


i'm so obsessed, i'm becoming a bore

by TheSubtextMachine



Category: Degrassi, Degrassi the Next Generation
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, JT lives bc I said so, Mental Health Issues, Supportive Sisters, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-01-11 06:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18424830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSubtextMachine/pseuds/TheSubtextMachine
Summary: Toby's maybesortadefinitely in love with Liberty. Years in his life from middle school to college as he deals with this unfortunate fact





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally gonna be a one shot but it got to 60 pages and I figured that I could start breaking it up a lil bit. Also comment, kudos, and smaSH that subscribe button.

Toby’s always been a little bit in love with Liberty, but it’s no big deal at any point.

-

It starts at the very beginning, when they’re both too small for their own good and young enough to throw themselves into the world with nothing but trust. They exist on the rings of their school circles, not as cool as Sean or even Manny.

The thing about being total nerds, Toby realizes, is that no matter how much his best friend may despise her, or how much Liberty can get on the class’ nerves, he always feels a certain kinship with her. He also notices how she’s pretty in the way that J.T. doesn’t seem to notice.

Granted, Toby never had a specific, named crush on her in the way he had gotten a crush on Kendra or Emma. In those beginning days, he just had that piece in his heart for her struggles, for the smile that would split its way across her face when she absolutely nails a test.

Her crush on J.T. is more of a nuisance than anything else, quite honestly, because sometimes it hits him and wriggles its way into his self esteem. 

After all, Toby loves J.T. like a brother, he’s would die for him and kill for him. Despite that, he still finds himself absolutely baffled by Liberty’s blind crush. He could see Manny having a crush, or even Emma, but Liberty? Smart, driven Liberty, who has her nose in a book and a mind like a well oiled machine?

That part always gets to him, always makes the odd feeling of boiling blood slip through his consciousness. 

Especially since J.T. just brushes her off like she’s dust on his shoulder. Toby gets that Liberty isn’t as easily palatable as some of the other girls, and that sometimes she just has too much in her mind and in her mouth for him to easily appreciate, but how can he just do that without a second thought?

Toby refuses to ask himself what he’d do if Liberty felt that way towards him, because that’s much easier than confronting the way that sometimes he wants to rip J.T.’s head off when he says that crosses the invisible line, or the way his cheeks burst into flames when she’s humming some unrecognizable song and swaying along.

At the end of the day, Toby likes things easy. That’s how he wants his life. J.T. may be a glutton for punishment, but Toby only wants to cruise through his rented anime and slip through middle school without much incident. The thing about Liberty is that she isn’t easy, under any definition. She’s high maintenance and cares too much and too smart for her own good, so Toby keeps his head down.

-

Kendra is cute and just like Toby, they could be soulmates if Toby wasn’t still a kid in all senses of the word. She’s an easy girl to love, with the kind slant of her eyebrows and the way that she doesn’t do dumb things like the rest of Toby’s friends (and Liberty). She’s concerned when she needs to be, angry when it’s appropriate, and he likes her so much.

Toby may just like the idea of her, the idea of the Perfect Girl who’s convenient and nice enough to put up with his dumbassery, and she never seems totally real. 

They watch anime together for their first real date, camped out on the Isaacs’ couch with a bowl of popcorn wedged between them. 

It’s awkward and cute and Toby feels a little something missing. Of course he adores her, and she may adore him a little less, but he supposes that nothing should be off. It may be because he has a cold, or because he hasn’t done his math homework yet, or the hundred other things that keep a twinge of discomfort in his stomach.

It doesn’t feel exactly right for whatever reason, and he guesses that it’s just because of him. He’s too weird, too uncomfortable, too sweaty to match up to the idea of Kendra.

He stays with her, of course. Because if Toby Isaacs wins the lottery and manages to find a girl who doesn’t find him too heinous, then he needs to latch on.

Even if her brother is a bit crazy, and she doesn’t ask him questions, and he isn’t as overjoyed about dating Kendra as he is about dating someone, period, he’s not going to give all of that up.

-

Toby’s life continues to blister around him, without thought or care as to what he wants or thinks. J.T. yells at Liberty for what is apparently the crime of having a crush, launching her into a day-long 50’s biker phase. Toby wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s adorable, because J.T. is his best friend and Liberty might as well be the antichrist, as far as their friend group knows her. Nonetheless, he can’t, for the life of him, stop himself from smiling at the gauzy red scarf tied around her neck.

The jacket may be too shiny, and she may be a total cornball, but she is certainly not a cute cornball. At all. Not. At. All.

J.T. finds out that she’s gotten herself a boyfriend, some friend of Sean’s, and Toby thinks that it’s just in time. If Toby can get a girlfriend, shouldn’t Liberty be able to get someone to date, too?

He doesn’t really think about the way that he thinks of Liberty’s relationship as somehow intertwined with his, in which her getting a boyfriend is somehow a natural conclusion to him finding a girlfriend. This is markedly ridiculous, and he figures this out sometime after 3am, and he’s doodling in the sketchbook he got for Christmas, letting his mind wander.

It wanders to Liberty, for some reason.

-

Summer slips into Toby’s life, and next thing he knows, life is okay. Sure, his sunscreen slips off when he’s swimming with Kendra in the public pool, and J.T. rolls his eyes at him whenever he gets passionate about something, but everything is borderline heavenly until late July.

It’s a sort of domino effect: Toby has to run to the grocery store to get milk, he trips on a wayward tree stump, he stutters his greetings to the grocery store clerk, and then on the walk home, he sees Liberty walking hand in hand with her boyfriend from across the street. This spoils his already rotten mood.

He doesn’t know why, but this feels like a perfect V of ravens against a stormy grey sky.

The next day, his sister yells at him, his popcorn burns, and Kendra breaks up with him.

She does it over the phone, and he’s stuck against the living room wall, listening as his first girlfriend rips him apart from the inside out. She’s sweet, and he can hear the vague mumblings of Star Trek under her words, and he gets the feeling that she’s in a position as awkward as he is. He curses the fact that Ashley is allowed to have a cell phone, and he isn’t, leaving him glued to a spot where his parents could walk in at any time and watch his heart break, bit by bit.

Kendra is obviously nervous, judging by the way she rambles about boarding school and scholarships and big opportunities and not wanting to hold you back, Toby. She swears that she likes him, that she liked him like that, but that she doesn’t want to do long distance.

“I get it. Can we still be friends? Like, if you ever visit for the holidays, could you stop by and watch some anime with me? I’ll actually make the popcorn sweet, no rock paper scissors involved,” Toby says, and it sounds a bit like pleading to his ears, but it’s nothing but honest.

“I’d love that. We’ll keep in touch?” she asks, and Toby nods, before realizing that she can’t see him.

“We’ll keep in touch. Goodbye, Kendra.”

“Bye, Toby.” 

A silence ensues, like Toby’s trying to hang on for as long as he can. Kendra’s the one who hangs up, and the kind click feels like a jolt in his stomach, and he hangs the phone back on the wall. It all seems to sink in, and he feels obnoxiously heavy as he lets his forehead fall against the wallpaper next to the phone hook.

He feels a prickle beneath his eyes, and slowly turns to trudge back to his room, furiously wiping the tears that leak from his watery eyes.

The heavenly summer crashes beneath the steps of his heavy sneakers. Everything hurts and he wants to scream. An image of Liberty flashes in his mind, and he doesn’t know why.

-

Before the summer properly ends, he has a quiet, secret dream about Liberty that doesn’t make any sense. It’s the peak of August when it arrives, the images lingering in his memories and the question of _why_ never really leaving his mind.

He dreams of the kind of white sun days, where it takes up the clouds and makes everyone smile a bit wider. He and Liberty are in a field, the backyard of some intricate kind of world, and there’s a large white house behind them. The grass is soft beneath them, their fingers are kindly linked between them.

They are both older, he can feel it in the way their arms sway a bit differently, or in the way that they’re taller and prettier and can take longer steps. Both of them are laughing about something, a kind of sentimental, early morning laugh, and Toby feels lightness all around him, all within him.

He turns to Liberty, only to see that she’s already looking at him, eyes softer than that one fleece jacket she carries everywhere on cold winter days. He touched the sleeve once, when he had to get her attention for something or other, and the way that it felt beneath his fingertips shook him to his core. It was the oddest thing, but the feeling stays.

In this dream, they are silent, save for the puffs of air beneath the spring sun.

“Hey, Toby?” she asks, and he nods, still looking at her.

“Yeah? he asks, trying to solidify the fact that he’s interested. In this dreamy, hazy world, he knows that Liberty always wants to know that he cares about what she has to say. 

“I don’t have a ring or anything, but do you want to get married?” Liberty asks, and he can see the way that her eyes are wide with anxiety and her step slows down, until they’re standing and facing each other. Toby feels the smile on his face, and sees that Liberty has begun to smile in return.

“Well, lucky for you, I have a ring,” he says, reaching into the jean pocket that has the ring he’s been carrying around for all that time, and he’s sure that Liberty just might crumple from happiness, judging by the way that she’s smiling so hard.

“I am going to assume that’s a yes,” she says, pulling out her hand and letting the ring slide on her finger, and he leans in for a kiss.

Toby wakes up before their lips touch, because before and after everything, God is cruel to him.

-

When school starts up again, Toby realizes in earnest that the only thing more embarrassing than getting broken up with is telling all your friends that it happened. He, Emma, and Liberty make up the “Lonely Hearts Club (as a result of summer breakups with people who weren’t part of our friend group or close to anyone else but us, so the only long term effects are merely individual and emotional, the repercussions don’t manifest socially but it still hurts)”. They just call themselves the Lonely Hearts Club, which is significantly catchier. The trio spends a couple lunch periods bitching about the situation, and Toby feels like he gets to know Liberty infinitely better in these sessions.

He tries to ignore the dream, still hanging around in his mind and even making some return appearances in his subconscious. 

First, he learns that Liberty mostly got to know her boyfriend after they started dating. She knew his name and that he liked her, but it was only by the second date that she even knew his favorite class, or his opinions on school (Liberty still remembered both of these things, with the anal retentive manner she approached everything). 

This made him a bit of a wild card, reportedly, and Liberty never really knew how to deal with those.

He also learns that Liberty learned how to kiss, which definitely doesn’t make his dream situation better.

Liberty listens intently to his own complaints of feeling like Kendra never loved him as much as he loved her, and of the constant feeling of being on edge, like the floor would slip out from under him at any possible moment. 

Emma raises her own gripes about never trusting a cheater and feeling like a disappointment, and Toby listens carefully to it all, but he can’t help but let his eyes drift over to Liberty once in a while, only for him to look back at Emma and see her confusion and suspicion. He wants to know what she sees, because he certainly can’t see it himself.

J.T. may be making fun of him for his “girl talk” lunches, but they become a sort of precious hour for him, where it becomes nothing but him and the honesty that he treasured so dearly. 

One time, the three of them are holed up in a classroom after school, and they begin by working on a project but it ends with Liberty crying, finally coming to terms with what happened over the summer. The leaves have begun to fall already, and the three of them feel the way that time passes so quickly, but their hearts move so slowly.

Tears are rolling down that face that he knows so well from dreams and daydreams and friendship since forever, and he wraps his awkward, growing arms around her.

It’s enough, if only for a sobbing, sweaty moment.

-

That year, Toby falls into a friendship with Rick Murray that ends with gunshots, and it shakes him up from his core. He starts trembling and he doesn’t really stop.

It starts that night, staring at the gleaming television screen and watching the news, _his news_ , and the hair on his arms stand on end and he misses Kendra for a searing minute. Misses her simplicity, her comfort. Instead of calling her, he writes a letter to his friends from before, still stiff with shock under the covert light of his desk.

Four sheets of looseleaf paper, addressed to a simpler time. One for Manny, saying that he missed the way they used to be the same. One to Emma, wishing that they could’ve started it all again and changed the ending. One to J.T., ink smudged with tears, saying that he wanted to be as close as they once were, as they could be.

The last one is addressed to Liberty. She was never his friend back then in the way that the others were, but she remains a constant presence in his mind whenever he thinks about before. Her and her oval glasses, her raised hand, it sticks in his memory like nothing else.

He writes this down. Toby also writes down that he thinks that J.T. might like her back, but this makes him weirdly mad, so he crosses it out. His fingers are shaking around his pencil, which seems too sweaty, too hot, under his pudgy hand. He’s already crying from J.T.’s letter, so his hand is shaking and making the words look like chicken scratch as a drop of sweat or a tear falls on the page.

Toby doesn’t write about the dream. He just writes about how insanely glad he is that he’s alive and that Liberty is alive and they have a future, that they have years left together. It’s sappy and droll, but he’s smiling by the time he’s done. He’s overtaken by warmness and affection for her. 

Despite his smile, he’s shaking on his office chair, tears rolling down his face of their own accord, and the door opens. It’s Ashley, hair done up in a messy bun and dressed in her bed clothes: her dad’s college shirt and flannel pants.

“Tobes? Are you okay?” she asks, and Toby starts laughing beneath the tears. It must sound maniacal to Ashley’s ears.

“I’m alive,” he says, and that’s more true than anything. He’s alive, suffering from the shared blessing and burden of consciousness, crying over a memory that his mind can’t forget and a future that he’s just dumb enough to hope for.

“I’m here for you. I know this is awful, but if you ever want to talk to me about-”

“Can I talk about dumb stuff? I feel like I’ll be talking about today a lot, but can I just come to you about… y’know… the dumb teen stuff?” he asks, trying in vain to wipe away the tears.

Ashley looks touched. 

“Of course. What are you writing?” she asks, as if already getting ready to be the official receiver of Toby’s Dumb Stuff.

“Letters to my friends. I want them to know how much I love them.”

“That sounds great!”

“I don’t know how to finish this one, though,” Toby says, tears coming back to his eyes as his hand reaches out to Liberty’s letter.

“Who’s it to?” Ashley asks, moving from the doorway to take a seat on his bed.

“Liberty.”

“I liked her. What’d you write?” 

Toby answers this by handing the page over to Ashley, who looks over it with a mix of worry, fondness, and complete exasperation as Toby focuses his energy into holding himself together.

“What else do you want to say?” she asks diplomatically, and Toby hates the way that she looks like she knows something that Toby doesn’t, but it’s a secret he’s too fragile to learn.

There’s a list of things his mind conjures up: his dream, the way that he has her short story that made it into the Degrassi Literary Journal bookmarked with a post-it note, how much he misses their lunches together, movies he wants to see with her, books he thinks she would like. 

“I don’t know,” he whispers. The truth scares him too much to be spoken out loud.

“Then just say ‘Sincerely, Toby’, and if anything else comes to mind, just write another letter,” says Ashley, quiet and wise. 

“It still doesn’t feel right,” Toby says, and it becomes hard to see. His eyes are hot and everything is a bit blurry.

“It won’t feel right for a long time,” Ashley says back, and Toby buries his face in his hands. He hears the door close, feels the shift in the room, the heightening of desperation. Ashley’s right. He knows it and he hates it.


	2. Chapter 2

Toby comes back to school, and everything seems a bit blurry and dream-like. He’s still feeling tiny tremors in him like an earthquake that no one else can see, and he becomes lab partners with Liberty. 

They have their class together first thing on Monday mornings, so he always sees her when she’s the most soft and bleary-eyed that she can be in public. He’s exhausted, of course, so he can’t do much else other than listen to the sound of her voice as she tries to talk through an experiment. He can barely listen to the words, but her voice has this melodic ability to carry him through the morning in all of it’s ranges.

Toby has the poetic mental capacity of a toddler, but in his sleepy head, he theorizes that Liberty’s voice is like some kind of vast oil painting, with different layers and shades that all coalesce into something more beautiful, more whole than the sum of its parts. He could listen to its ebb and flow all day, and sometimes he swears that he does. 

After all, the fact that they share this one class becomes a springing board for the quietest of friendships, where they would walk to classes together and share lunches on rainy days.

There’s the quiet understanding of their shared history, of middle school and high school and J,T.’s looming presence in their life, but they don’t talk about the past, they just talk about now.

They talk about the frivolities of their lives after the Incident. Toby recommends animes that Liberty watches after she does her homework, and Liberty talks at length about her never ending quest to find the perfect coffee order. Normality slowly creeps back into their life as silently as it can, with only a couple of hiccups.

Anniversaries are hard for Toby, and parties are hard for Liberty. 

It becomes a fact of their shared lives, that every time the 16th day of the month swirls around or Liberty is invited to a party by someone she would bet secretly hates her, they would help each other out.

Usually it results in a phone call that lasts for too long, where Toby gets a clearer picture of Liberty’s voice as it comes through from a phone in some acquaintances house, or from the phone in her room, which provides a steady soundtrack of classical music from her stereo.

It’s on one of these early winter nights that it actually hits Toby, right in the center of his chest. Liberty is at a party, borrowing someone’s flip phone while she pretends to call her mom about a family emergency, and Toby is stuck beside the kitchen’s wall phone, smiling at the mere sound of her voice, and it suddenly becomes so crazy clear.

Toby is in love with Liberty. 

They’ve become friends, they’ve known each other for forever, and she’s always been in his mind and _holy shit_ , he’s in love with Liberty. 

And it hurts.

The way that he always remembers her, and how he knows her like he knows himself. The way that he always scoffed at J.T. being dumb enough to hate her, and the way that he can never stop looking at her when she’s in the same room. It hits him in his chest, that he’s stuck in love with the girl he’s in this hushed friendship with.

“...Toby?”

“Yeah?”

“I think I lost you. You were quiet for a long time,” she says, and it makes Toby want to cry a little bit.

“Yeah. I guess I was.”

“Penny for your thoughts?” she asks, and Toby has to blink so hard and so fast to keep from crying that it makes his eyelids hurt a little bit.

“I’m sorry, I won’t go for anything less than a dime,” and the words come out easily, despite the fact that he’s fighting tears from rolling down his face. She starts laughing, and the sound makes one roll down his face. He’s hurting so deeply, so completely, that he’s a bit shocked that it doesn’t come through on the phone.

“Deal. Be ready to find two nickels in your locker on Monday. So spill: what are you thinking?”

Toby scrambles for something to say, and the words come of their own accord, it seems.

“You have a really interesting voice. I was thinking about it, y’know? There’s Morning Liberty, there’s Sad Liberty, hell, remember that one time you read some poetry to me? That was a voice of its own,” he says, and he feels like it’s a bit too romantic for the casual answer he was aiming for. Close enough?

On the other line, he hears someone at the party scream in some kind of drunken cackle, and then a murmur closer to the phone, and the crackle of Liberty shifting.

“Toby, stop, I’m gonna cry,” she says, and Toby practically sprawls with his panic.

“What? Liberty, are you okay?” he asks, and he hears the sniffle, and he’s one step away from banging his head on the wall with frustration at how dumb, dumb, _dumb_ he is, making Liberty cry.

“You’re so- so nice, Tobes! And I care about you so much, and I’m so tired I’m about to collapse and, I’m so sorry it’s just that sometimes I feel so alone but, I’m about to cry so I know I sound so weird right now but-”

“I get it,” he says, and there’s a pause, another sniffle and wet sob, and all the sudden it slips out, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Toby! You’re the b-best friend I have, and I care about you! So much! I’m so glad that we know each other!” she says, and Toby’s heart is warmed by her sincerity, even though she definitely interpreted that “I love you” as platonic, and he’s okay with that. He may be in love with her, sure, but at least she cares about him, right? 

They keep talking, and the emotions like radio fuzz in his head slow down to a dull roar. 

They wish each other good night, like they always do, and Toby can’t keep the tears inside as he stares up at his ceiling and thinks about it.

I love you.

I love you too.

The words are too simple for what he’s feeling. They don’t account for the way he feels like he’s folded in on himself, or how his heart feels so tight when the next Monday, he finds exactly two nickels at the bottom of his locker. Some four letter words can’t capture all that, but the facts don’t really change.

He loves Liberty Van Zandt, and that’s just the truth.

-

He never sees the blossoming chemistry between J.T. and Liberty, he just hears about it. The weird part is that he hears about it from J.T., of all people. He talks about the way that his stomach feels a bit different around her, and sometimes J.T. forgets who he is and gets swept up in some speech about how passionate Liberty can get, and how insanely smart she is in the oddest moments.

J.T. used to hate these things (a fact that Toby never speaks out loud, but he repeats it in his mind with some misplaced satisfaction), but now he sees the sweaty beauty in it. 

Toby knows the feeling, if he’s being honest, but it tastes bitter on his tongue.

Either way, Toby reasons that J.T. is going through another vapid crush, the kind he gets all the time on all sorts of people. The only difference now is that the crush happens to be on Liberty. Strong, smart, utterly amazing Liberty.

Whatever, Toby thinks, rolling his eyes behind J.T.’s back. It won’t lead to anything.

-

The day before Toby finds out that the crush actually went somewhere, Ashley trudges back into the house, eyeliner smeared and on the verge of tears. Toby had been busy on the couch, reading a book for English, and his head snaps up when she gives him a broken, worn out “Hi”.

“What’s wrong?”

“Love sucks,” she says, so world weary and _tired_ that Toby can’t help but understand her pain.

“You’re preaching to the choir, Ash. Remember what you told me after the whole, uh, Rick incident?” he asks, and it still hurts a bit, but he powers through the tremble to support his sister.

“What about it?”

“If you ever need to complain about dumb stuff to someone, I’m game. And if you ever want to get distracted, I’ve got tons of dumb stuff going on that you would absolutely love.”

“Hit me with a sample,” she says, and he can see her lift a bit. 

“I’m in love with Liberty, right?”

“So you figured that one out?” she asks, a bit too sadly for it to be considered a victory on her part. 

“Yeah, I did. That was a rough one. But guess who has a crush on her?” Toby asks, and Ashley’s face falls a bit, and they both know the answer. Nonetheless, he has to say it out loud to totally believe it.

“J.T. Yorke.”

“You poor bastard. Stop making me miss being an underclassman,” she says, and it’s fond enough that he can brush off the implications. He shoos her off, and goes back to reading, his mind only a little bit preoccupied.

-

He actually hears the big news the next morning, muffled and giddy over the phone.

J.T. is the one who tells him. It feels a bit like betrayal.

J.T., his best friend of years upon years, the partner in years of fumbling spit shakes and blood pacts, is the one who tells him about sudden sparks and making the move.

It makes _sense_ , says the unforgiving, scientist part of Toby’s mind. Not to mention the fact that if Toby heard it from Liberty, in her linen voice with the occasional nervous giggle, he would’ve cried before she even hung up. These are the facts, this is the data and the hypothesis and every other thing his teachers drilled into his head so long ago.

Nonetheless, Toby can’t help the emotions that spring to his eyes as he finds himself once again staring at his bedroom ceiling, dark and tinted blue by his lava lamp. 

These days, Toby feels like he’s nothing but emotions.

-

J.T. and Liberty seem to practice restraint around him, which makes him simultaneously thankful and suspicious. His overactive brain whirs with questions of what they know, and how much they know. 

They’re so cautious, in fact, that it takes two weeks for him to even see the two of them kiss. It’s a little glimpse, some oddly domestic touch as the two are separating to go to their simple classes. Just a cute little peck, paired cleanly with toothy smiles. 

Toby’s a fool who wonders what it would feel like to be in J.T.’s shoes at that moment, and he’s a coward who never says a word about it. 

For a brief second, he questions whether he’ll still be the one Liberty cries to when she’s in a crisis at a party, and his stomach drops when he figures that the answer is probably no. It’s this moment when he realizes that he’s been standing, frozen, in the center of the hallway and he hurries to his next class, looking at the scuffed floor and hoping with his whole heart that he’s not receiving any stares. 

-

The first Jiberty (as Manny so lovingly calls them) fight happens slowly and then all at once. Toby watches it all go down over the weeks-worth of lunches they share, starting on Monday with a badly placed eye roll from J.T. Liberty tries to playfully get him to eat his celery, and then he responds a bit too harshly, and Toby sees the way Liberty’s face slips a bit, in some kind of upset.

The next day at lunch, Toby can feel the bloated beginnings of a storm through the windows, the sky is veiled in silky grays and silvers. It is on this day that Liberty deals her own slight, with a little snap at him when he shrugs off his homework. It’s just a one liner, and the words easily fly over J.T.’s head but the tone is not lost on him.

“Fine, I’ll do the worksheet,” he says, and his terse voice leads to a tight, uncomfortable silence around the table that is only broken by Toby, whipping out some useless gossip that he overheard in second period. 

The discomfort isn’t at all lost, it is only bent to make it a bit more manageable. 

It comes back to its stiff, awful form, when Toby starts up a conversation about something on the news last night, his focus split between Liberty’s insights and his bland turkey sandwich. It’s Wednesday, and Toby sees that fire in her eyes and feels the slight twinge of a headache behind his eyes. Liberty gets a wicked smile, and turns to J.T., who Toby had forgotten entirely.

“What do you think, babe?” she asks meanly, and he shoots her a dirty look that makes Toby’s headache burn louder.

“I didn’t watch it,” he says, and Toby already knows that. _Liberty_ already knows that.

“Pray tell, what were you doing instead?” she asks, taking on that prissy tone of voice.

J.T. doesn’t answer, he just takes an angry bite of his leftover spaghetti. Toby takes a gulp, and looks out of the window. The sky has grown darker, and he wonders if he should break the silence again.

He doesn’t.

Instead, he listens to the silence like it’s a symphony: listens to the way the cracked window lets him hear the chatter outside, and the wind as it brushes against the trees. He listens to the faint sounds of chewing, of J.T. tapping his worn sneakers against the tile. 

The next day, they break in earnest: their verbal jabs increase in intensity over lunch, until Liberty grabs J.T. by the wrist and insists that they go somewhere else, giving a pointed look at Toby, as if to silently say that they’re embarrassing themselves in front of him. They were, but Toby figures it’s a bit hard to truly embarrassing to someone who knew you in middle school.

They storm out, and he doesn’t hear their words, he just hears their voices, stretched and angry and so, so tired. He takes another bite of his turkey sandwich, and wonders if this would happen if he were the one dating Liberty.

On Friday, there’s no yelling, just radio silence. J.T. doesn’t join them at lunch, so it’s just Toby and Liberty, alone in the room while the sky rains down on them, hitting the windows with ferocity. In some odd way, it’s comfortable: the way that they can just sit in silence with no issue, and Liberty can steal Toby’s carrot sticks even though she has some of her own.

Five minutes in, she pulls out a book. It’s a Victorian poetry anthology, and Toby falls a little bit more in love with her.

As things usually are in the Jiberty relationship, Toby hears about the good things and sees the bad things, so he never gets a first-person look at them making up, but it happens over the weekends. Toby hears about it on Monday morning, when he’s still bleary with sleep and J.T. is filled with energy, so much that he’s practically spilling it on the ground.

He’s smiling, and he rambles on about how they had a cinematic end to their first fight, in the pouring rain on the sidewalk outside of his house. His grandma witnessed the whole thing, which takes away a little bit of the romance, but J.T. is just fine with the fact that he got to kiss the “girl of my dreams” while it was raining cats and dogs.

Toby smiles, laughs nervously, and ignores the small shake in his hand when he pats J.T. on the shoulder in a perfect facsimile of brotherly affection.

-

Then, there’s another bout of calmness, of silence. They’re like the weather, Toby decides, always changing but never failing to fall back into their rhythm of storm and silken blue skies. They’re a sweet couple, he supposes, when they aren’t clashing over their differences.

One day, J.T. genuinely confides in him, past the usual type of bro-talk and bitching about the ladies in their lives. Instead, he falls into the doe-eyed kind of loving talk that Toby keeps in a constant inner monologue. 

“I think I’m in love with her, Tobes,” he says, sprawled on the bottom bunk of Toby’s bunk bed, the one that’s just a bit too small for both of them now. Toby is spinning around listlessly in his almost-broken office chair, pushed out from his cluttered desk so he can spin endlessly.

“Yeah?” Toby asks, and J.T. is staring above, not at Toby or anywhere else in the room. He’s just looking, dreaming up at the sky.

“It’s just, I can imagine marrying her. And I know that all teenagers say that, and whatever, but this is _Liberty_. Something about her… she’s so easy to fall in love with, in a weird way,” he says, and Toby knows this, but he nods dumbly at nothing in particular.

“Marriage? That’s big.”

“I mean, I can imagine dating other people, finding other women attractive, even being in long term relationships. But marriage? Forever? Being someone for a long time and just being content with someone? It’s Liberty, Liberty from beginning to end.”

“But you guys are so… tumultuous,” Toby says, thinking of the fights, of the constant lingering question of how long it would last.

“Sometimes, but there’s this thing that we’ve started to do, when it’s just her and me at my house. Just me, her, and the book she’s reading. I’ll pretend to sleep, and just watch her. She’s so _calm_ like that, Tobes, so content. I love it. I love her.”

The words stand stiff in the air. Toby feels pain in some indefinable place.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Toby asks, hoping that his voice doesn’t sound broken. It feels weird that J.T. can talk about his relationship like this, and make it seem so much more real than Toby ever expected.

“Wanna hear something embarrassing?” J.T. asks, and Toby hears his bashful smile instead of sees it.

“Sure.”

“I thought you had a thing for her, but I think I get it now. I think you’re her best friend. And I also think that you’re my best friend. And you’re fond, I guess. That’s how Liberty describes it: fond. You don’t need to date or anything, you guys can just hang out and be fond of each other. It’s nice,” J.T. says, and Toby actively tries to school his face to appear as Not In Love With Liberty Van Zandt as possible, but he doesn’t know what that looks like, so he’s pretty sure he fails at it.

“Yeah, I get that. I don’t even know if I have my own best friend, though,” Toby says, and it sounds much sadder out loud than it did in his head.

“I can be your best friend, if you want,” J.T. says, the jokey tone creeping back into his voice, shifting away from the previous gravity of the previous gravity.

“Sure,” Toby says, feeling like his mind has been emptied by this conversation.

“I’m gonna be the best best friend you’ve ever had, Toby Isaacs,” J.T. says, confident as he whips his eyes to Toby, still spinning around. 

Toby has had him as a best friend before, has even possibly had Rick as a best friend before (which makes him shudder a bit with that thought). He wonders if Liberty is his best friend, but decides to drop it. Thinking is hard, Toby realizes, but spinning round and round is easy.

-

The rhythm continues, another fight, another respite of peace. Toby falls into it, into letting them confide in him and sitting through their stony silence. Being friends with them takes up a lot of his time, but the rhythm’s only broken when Kendra comes to town to visit.

Toby ditches ‘Gang’s Night at the Roller Rink’ to have a sit-down talk with her. They both order green tea, and it takes a second or two to adjust.

Kendra is so much taller, and Toby feels like a balloon being stretched. He’s suddenly aware of how old he is, how different he is. 

Kendra’s different too. She cuts her own hair and thinks that Norwegian metal is the best genre of music. She name drops some mysterious “Stella”, and when Toby asks her about it, she shyly answers that Stella is her girlfriend.

“How about you?” she asks, visibly stiff and awkward.

“How about what?” Toby asks back, confused and still shell-shocked from the realization that his first girlfriend was a lesbian. It makes sense, in his cruel hindsight, but it never crossed his mind before.

“Your love life. Any lucky ladies? Lucky dudes, even?” 

Toby has a choice. He can shrug it off, he can lie, or he can tell someone his secret.

“Promise you won’t tell anyone?” he asks, fidgeting his fingers.

“Who would I tell?” she asks, deadpan but curious.

“I see your point. As far as my love life is, though, I’m kind of hung up on someone. She’s taken, so it’s a dead end, but-”

“Do I know her?”

“Yes. She went to middle school with us, the whole nine yards,” Toby said, running his hand through his gelled hair and hoping against hope that Kendra didn’t remember Liberty.

“Oh my god, is it Liberty? Van Zandt, right?” she asks, her face gleaming like she won the lottery.

“What? How did you know?” Toby asks, and his mind is back in paranoia mode. Who knows? Does everyone know? How long have I been in love with someone? Did I miss my chance?

“Lucky guess?” she says, and Toby only has to level a glare ather for her to tell the truth, so she continues. “I just remember that you thought she was so smart, so interesting, and yada-yada-yada. You’d talk about it sometimes, especially when you got really tired. All it took was a sugar crash and someone to prompt you and off you went. It was pretty funny.”

“How’d you know it was romantic, though?” Toby asks, remembering his entirely professional _fondness_ for her, back in the day.

“I didn’t know. But you said that I knew her and it just sort of clicked, I guess. What can I say? Hindsight is 20/20.”

“It really is.”

-

Summer comes again, and he spends it swimming in the public pool with J.T. and Liberty. He gets tan enough and he somehow gets even taller, despite the fact that he feels like if he got an inch taller he’d simply collapse from all of the gangly feelings that plague him at all times, where his limbs feel too long and too thin to be comfortable anywhere (he has no idea how J.T. does it). 

J.T. gets in the bad habit of telling Toby lengthy accounts of his burgeoning sex life, which Toby tries and fails to block out of his mind.

He tried so hard to not think about Liberty in that way, but now the fact seems to be unavoidable.

Toby gets used to the feeling of being uncomfortable at all times, whether he’s listening to J.T. talk about the night before, or he’s staring in the mirror, feeling awful about the way he’s shaping up, and getting harsh flashbacks to middle school. He considers “relapsing”, as his sister would inevitably call it. 

There’s this feeling that drenches his mind: that if he looked/acted/were different, he would get the life he wanted. He would get the affection and the popularity he spent his whole life striving for.

He gathers up all the mental strength he has, and forces himself to eat the way his sister wants.

He never thought choosing not to do something would be that hard.

-

When school starts again, loud and unapologetic, Liberty and J.T. simultaneously get worse and better.

The fighting gets louder, more mercurial. The good parts get better, smoother and calmer and more heavenly. Toby somehow gets used to that much, better at sensing when the tide is about to shift for the 100th time. They never get normal, but they quickly become predictable. Toby gets used to seeing the worst sides of his best friends, with all of their pettiness and inability to compromise.

Everything changes, though, when Liberty gets pregnant.

J.T. tells him first, right after he finds out, but when Liberty breaks the news to him, he pretends like it’s a surprise.

The real surprise is their decision to keep the baby, to make a family grow out of their teenage tempers. J.T. tearfully assures him that he’ll be the godfather of this incomprehensible child, and that everything will be fine. So, so fine.

They spend the first few days after the shared realization oscillating between intense panic and rosy ideas for the future. Liberty is terrified, but somehow excited for her kid, who would inevitably be as smart as her and as funny as J.T.

They’re dreaming a bit, and Toby doesn’t want to stop that yet. 

Marriage is the bright pink elephant in the room, and Toby just _knows_ that he’ll be the best man and for a second, he dreams of saying “I object” at that fatal moment.

Granted, Toby knows that he would never do that in the real world, but he can’t stop his mind from whirring and trembling like an overwhelmed machine.

He thinks about marriage, about expensive rings and “I do”s and then that dream comes back, the one where he and Liberty are walking, feeling the humid sunrise around them as they kiss, rings cold on their fingers.

Toby tries to shake it off.

He hears too much, anyway. About Liberty’s changed home life, about J.T.’s anxieties, and even about the fact that after all this, they somehow still love each other. 

It all seems to stuff into his head, filling it up until he feels like it’s going to burst. 

He even talks to Ashley about it, asking why he’s the one panicking while his friends are the ones about to have a goddamned _kid_ , and she gives him ten different non-answers. She tells him to unload his mind however he can, and he starts talking the way that J.T. and Liberty do: he tells her about the question of getting married, the ideas of what the kid should be named, and even how confused he still loves Liberty despite the fact that he’s seen her vomit, seen her scream, seen her cry so hard she can’t even stand. 

His throat get sore, he talks for so long. He’s been listening so much, and just putting the words into the air helps. 

Eventually, he has to go to sleep, and he revels in the momentary, blessed moment of emptiness, fully aware that when he goes back to school the next day, his head will be stuffed again with it all.

-

He’s right, because J.T. can’t stop talking about the pains of getting a job, and Liberty’s getting bigger, and time is passing so fast Toby just might faint. His brain feels full, his throat feels full, and his stomach feels so full that he wonders, for a second, before turning that train of thought off like it’s a light switch.

J.T. overdoses all of the sudden, and everything gets so much worse. Liberty is the one who tells Toby, when it’s late at night and he hears it over the shitty speaker of the home phone. She’s crying, but he learned how do decipher her crying-talk a long time ago, and suddenly his life is moving at warp speed. He’s comforting a hysterical Liberty, getting dressed, and trying to tell mom why he needs to leave _right now_ and get to the hospital. 

It’s this collage of panic: everything layering on each other, from the sobs in his left ear to the vague feeling like his walls are going to crash in on him at any moment.

Toby doesn’t even ask for his mom to drive him, he doesn't have those kinds of mental faculties. He tells Liberty to call his cell, and then he steals Ashley’s bike.

He hasn’t ridden a bike an 8 years, but he knows where the hospital is, and needs to get there right now. Liberty is crying, and he would be crying but his nose feels like it’s on fire, and the tears just won’t fall. He pedals like a maniac, unsteady and wild, with the cell phone on speaker in the cute little basket that hangs in the front of the bike.

“Tobes, are you okay?” Liberty asks on a sigh, and Toby’s stomach hurts like hell, and the houses in his neighborhood have never felt this tall, he’s never felt this young, this small before.

“Yeah,” he gasps out, and keeps pedaling. 

His stomach clenches, like someone’s fist is squeezing, and he stops the bike, in the middle of a vacated street three blocks away.

He gets off the bike and throws up in a stranger’s yard. 

His stomach, his body, it feels so empty and clean, but his head is still screaming. He’s shaking, he’s blinking so fast, and he wonders for a second if he’s about to pass out. He hears a noise from the basket, and walks/crawls to the bike again.

“What happened? You cut out on me! I can’t l-lose you too! What the fuck is happening?” Liberty asks, and her voice sounds dirty against the sanitized ambient noise of the hospital. 

“It’s all good,” he croaks out, and he urges to be clear again, not marred and cracked like this. His lips are so chapped, and his throat feels raw. His stomach rumbles.

“What’s happening?” she asks, and it sounds more existential this time. Toby doesn’t know what to do, he’s breaking down to his basic elements too.

“I don’t know, Liberty.”

“What am I going to do?” she asks, and he pulls himself back up on the bike. 

“What do you want to do?” he asks, and it feels lame when the words are in the air.

“I don’t think we can keep the baby. We aren’t- can’t be parents,” she says, like it’s been on her mind for hours. Toby starts pedaling, and nods before realizing that she can’t hear him nod.

“I support you through whatever, Liberty, I’m getting to the hospital soon.”

“I think I need to break up with him,” she says, and Toby half-registers it, because he’s working harder and harder to go faster and faster. It hits him in a blurry way, and he can only muster a shocked “Really?”.

He makes it out of a neighborhood, and is zipping down sidewalks and probably breaking a few laws and he keeps going. He’s a little bit dizzy, and all the lights are too bright, and there’s wetness on his cheeks like he’s been crying. Liberty talks through it, explains her reasons to herself and to Toby, and then he arrives at the hospital. He tells her, and next thing he knows, he’s back in civilized society.

The hospital feels like the Twilight Zone. His vision is doing a barrel roll, and everything is so bare and bright. He asks for James Yorke, and is ushered to a waiting room, where he sees Liberty.

She’s been crying, and he realizes that he’s been crying. She’s big, and he feels like he dives into her arms the second he sees her.

They’re hugging each other, and shaking with each other. They are on weak legs, and they just grip to each other, sobbing for their best friend. Toby feels like he’s lived a lifetime with this girl. They’re both so world weary, so _tired_ , that he feels like they’ve grown old together. 

In a way, they have.


	3. Chapter 3

Things happen afterwards, but they’re all grey and blurred together after that sharp night.

Liberty has the baby, she gives him up for adoption. Toby goes to the checkup and gets diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, which makes a lot of sense to Ashley. J.T. comes back to school, and the Jiberty saga ends quietly, with a mutual, teary breakup. Liberty apparently gets Toby in the divorce, because she’s the one he has lunches with now.

They get used to being alone. Liberty’s image has been changed forever, and he’s her only ally now that J.T. and his faction have peeled off. 

When the school year ends, they both look like they’re dead: with the massive bags beneath their eyes and falling asleep all the time. They get into the habit of taking naps together whenever they can.

They sleep in the chemistry lab during lunches, in a neat corner of the hallway during mornings, and on the Isaacs’ couch after school, with cable news playing in the background. 

They also have big conversations, telling secrets and making pacts. One morning, Mr. Kail gives them the lab to work on some research project, and next thing they know, they’re having a heart to heart over a vial of sodium hydroxide.

“Is it just me, or did we never deal with all our middle school shit?” Liberty asks, her voice in sleep-deprived monotone.

“What do you mean?” he asks, writing something down on his lab journal.

“Remember that Emma got catfished and almost assaulted? Like she was in genuine fear for her life, and the only reason nothing happened physically was because you guys could guess her password?” Liberty asks, and Toby doesn’t know where she’s going with this, but he’ll bite.

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Did she ever really deal with it? Did you ever deal with it? The life of your best friend was literally in your hands, and you could’ve dropped it. Did you ever, like, do something about it?”

“I mean, I thought about it a lot,” Toby says, trying to crush down his immediate mental response to that part of the memory.

“But does that count? I mean, we’ve all been through some crazy stuff, but when did we actually deal with it? Do you think our traumas are just going to compound on each other like this?”

“I guess. We might just have to wait until one of us has a complete breakdown for that one,” he says, forcing a joking tone as he peeks at Liberty trying to make sure that she pours just the right amount into her graduated cylinder.

“What counts as a breakdown?”

“Well, hypothetically, look at me. I was friends with a school shooter who killed himself in front of me and threatened my friends, dealt with an eating disorder, bullied for years, and my best friend had a drug overdose. What would be a breakdown for me?” he asks, trying to distance his words from the fire alarms going on in his mind.

“Maybe if you relapsed? That’s the first thing that comes to mind,” Liberty answers, her voice straying from its evenness. 

“Looks like I’m on the verge of a breakdown, then,” Toby says, too casually, and Liberty’s head snaps up. She puts her equipment down.

“You’ve been on the verge of relapsing? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How was I supposed to? There’s not a script for that kind of thing.”

There’s a heady silence between them, and Liberty seems to think hard behind her lab goggles. She somehow looks more alive now than she has in the last week, she’s so concerned.

“Then tell me now. What’s been going on?”

Toby starts talking, about feeling unloved and dirty and itchy, and it feels like a weight off his chest. Liberty breaks character and hugs him, and he tells her that she’s his best friend. It’s true and it makes his heart sear.

-

Summer slips into their life, and Toby feels like everything is moving way too fast. The one thing that doesn’t change is him and Liberty. They’re still exhausted, undeniably sad, and inseparable. They spend time on the couch, watching shows that remind Toby of middle school, of _before_. 

Liberty leaves for a week, to visit her son down in the US, and Toby does the dumb thing and writes a letter.

He’s sure Ash would be positively amused, seeing him write that fated PS, but Toby only feels dead. It’s sunny outside, but inside, Toby’s just grey. His mom starts throwing around the word “depression”, which is dangerous and a bit offensive to Toby. 

They fight about it over dinner, and Toby feels like ants are running along his bones as he says “isn’t anxiety enough? Stop trying to diagnose me, mom”.

It’s a cycle that he falls into, of sleeping too long and forgetting to eat, followed by his mom talking about “being worried”, followed again by an even deeper dive into the pool that was Toby’s greyness.

The break from it all is in the airport. Toby showered that morning, brushed his hair, and changed his clothes, preparing himself for this moment. He stands outside the baggage claim, tapping his toe as he scans the crowd.

He didn’t let his mom drive him, knowing that after this whole week, she’d be weird about it, about how happy he is. For a second, he forgets that he’s not dating her, and he imagines that they mark their reunion with a kiss.

Which is dumb. So dumb. 

But he still sees her hair in the crowd, a little bit blonder from the rare Seattle sun, and his heart starts beating again. Blood is pumping through his body again, he’s _alive_ again. 

They launch into a tight hug, her luggage abandoned as it swirls endlessly on the conveyor belt. He gets the vague, dangerous feeling that she missed him too, and he feels the grossest blossom of hope in his chest. Which is _dumb_.

They’re clutching to each other, and somehow, Toby is the one who moves out first. He’s struck with some undefinable brilliant idea, like melting wax that’s just now getting into shape.

“We need to rock this next year. You and I.”

Liberty nods furiously, and tries valiantly to not let a tear slip out of her eye. 

“I missed you, Tobes,” she says, and Toby adds this raw, sentimental tone to his library of Liberty’s voice.

-

They spend the next couple of weeks with a notebook, making and revising a list called “How To Make This Year Our BITCH!!”, which is undeniably, a title which is undeniably J.T.-ish. They don’t talk about that part.

Every other part of the list, however, gets discussed at length.

Eventually, they make a 47 step plan that looks more like a legal code than not. They add little flourishes to each step: like biblical “thee”s and “thou”s to the sections regarding behavior (“thou hast be cool to the underclassmen. You were an underclassman, and to underclassmanship thou shalt return.”), or putting little stickers and doodles in the margins of the notebook.

Section One is easily the most testy: “Join student government. Get that power over the student body”. Neither of them really know how they’d pull off going from peak nerds to winning a popularity contest like Student Council elections, but they figure that with Liberty’s drive and Toby’s connections, they can pull anything off.

Having Ashley Kerwin as a stepsister kind of makes Toby’s job way easier, even though she’s far away and already rocking up college, if her weekly emails are anything to go by. Her friends are his friends now, by some weird property of association. Therefore, he reasons, Student Council is a stretch, but not impossible.

Section Two through Forty Seven pale in comparison to that goal, as they are mostly just variations on “stay healthy mentally, physically, and academically”, but that concept is unfamiliar enough to them to be considered a goal. 

Toby has an involuntary to _back then_ , when things were just peachy with J.T., when he would gripe about his confusion over the fact that they’d go to school sick, get sicker, make each other sick, and take three weeks to properly get over a cold that could’ve been dealt with in one. The angsty, unreasonable part of his teenage mind screams that J.T. just didn’t understand them, and the reasonable part knows that he was probably right about that one.

These little realizations give him the weird feeling of being older, the feeling that he’s grown up and gotten better while also getting worse. 

Toby emerges from that summer taller, a little bit smarter, and considerably kinder. Having a best friend does that, sometimes.

-

The major shock when he goes back to school is J.T., and how the post-summer version of him has bags under his eyes and a new hunger to be Toby’s friend again, judging by the way he elects to sit next to Toby whenever they share a class together.

J.T. even starts throwing bits of the olive branch, like offering food whenever Toby’s stomach rumbles loudly in class (a worryingly regular occurrence). 

He doesn’t tell Liberty, but he also spends the occasional Tuesday afternoon at the Spoon with J.T. to do homework. In some weird way, it feels like cheating. J.T. does promise his vote for Toby when student council elections come around, so Toby more or less reasons that this is for Liberty’s best interest anyway.

This is a lie and he knows it, but being in a friendship with J.T. again, even in bits and pieces, feels too easy, like it’s second nature to him. He knows the beats of the conversations, and he doesn’t feel the burning in his chest at the unrequited love like he does with Liberty.

-

Three weeks into the school year, on the eve of the beginnings of the Student Council campaign season, Toby and Liberty get invited to a party. It’s by some mutual friend, the kind of Cool Guy with slicked back hair and a gap in his teeth.

His name is Monty, and he apparently appreciates the way that they tag team on tutoring him in Physics enough to invite them over on a night his parents are out. He promises some “bombass deejaying” from his brother, and some snacks, and they decide to formally accept.

When they arrive, on some slick Friday morning the night after a nasty rainfall, Monty greets the pair with a one armed hug and some cheese puffs in the other arm. They get pulled away from each other pretty quickly, because Toby’s friend from English _really_ thinks he’d enjoy this new guitar trick he learned, and some sophomore loves Liberty’s hair so much she demands a sit down conversation about how to emulate it.

Toby occasionally makes sure to shoot a glance to Liberty as she lounges on the other side of the room, in her element as she monologues on top of a soundtrack of 70s hits. His heart beats a bit faster, but it feels inexplicably natural in Monty’s living room, like his feelings are safe here.

It’s one of those cosmic parties, where he’s distracted enough to forget the thoughts that plague him at 11pm, but he’s tuned in enough to catch little details, like Monty’s hums to the music, or the lingering taste of cheese puff dust on his tongue.

Soon, he’s giggling at nothing, high on his own exhilaration. It catches on, and soon Monty’s smiling like an idiot, and everyone is bobbing along to the supernatural beat that thrums through the room.

Toby gets a flashback to a couple of years past, when Liberty would call him in moments of crisis at parties. He takes a swig of his ginger ale, and rocks his head while remembering those long nights, spent talking about everything and nothing all at once. 

Someone shouts “truth or dare”, and Toby feels too alive to object, so he just lets himself get corralled into the ring of people. He seeks out Liberty, and makes sure to take a seat next to her, so they can talk and elbow each other when something happens. It’s the beauty of friendship and being on the exact wavelength, of having similar souls and years of familiarity.

There’s a line of the usual fare: someone asking about crushes, a dare to eat something gross, a prickly question about an ex. 

Things spin around the second that Monty decides to tilt it on its axis, pointing his finger loosely at Toby, tapping into his theatre kid roots to boom “Truth or dare?” across the circle.

“Dare!” he yells back, cupping his hands around his mouth, and inciting little titters and giggles around the room. 

“Kiss Liberty!” Monty yells, receiving a mix of high fives and “oohs” from across the circle, with certain members looking way too excited for Toby’s liking.

He looks to Liberty, at the easy smile on her face, and silently asks if she’s fine with this. He doesn’t like the idea that it’s happening like this, even though he couldn’t put his finger on what would be a proper first kiss with Liberty. This isn’t it, he knows that much.

Liberty nods, and laughs a bit, and then she pulls her hand up to cup his jaw, and pulls him in. Everyone is screeching, but Toby tunes it all out, because he and Liberty are actually kissing.

He feels her lips against his, the softness and the slide of lip gloss, and the smell of her hair, so familiar but so much more strong than ever. He pulls a tentative hand to her hair, and it lasts for a few more precious moments before they pull away. Toby’s eyes can’t leave Liberty’s face, but she casts her eyes around, with a wicked smile and tired eyes.

Toby takes a seat again, and ignores the jeers and jokes. He just forces a smile, and keeps himself from touching his lips. 

He asks someone which teacher they had a crush on, and transcends further, his mind stuck on a loop of Liberty and her lips and the connection between them that can’t be erased.

He soon feels like a ghost, watching the game while not being a part of it. Eventually, he taps Liberty on the shoulder and asks when they plan to leave, and it makes them sound so much like a married couple, but she answers easily, still swaying and smiling to the soul of the party, the soul that Toby lost.

They leave fifteen minutes later, clambering into Liberty’s car. She cranks up some old disco CD that she stole from her mother, and Toby tries to make his soul leave his body as they move through the fogged up night. Liberty hums along, content and warm as the car bumps along the roads, lit with street lamps. Toby tries to focus on the glow of yellow on blue streets, but his mind is a broken record that can’t stop remembering the moment, in all of its screaming, laughing terror.

-

The student council elections are notable in how absurdly _boring_ they are, with no truly formidable opponents, some piggy bank money spent on making posters that no one totally cares about, and things only get serious the day of, when the chatter about who’s voting for who actually begins. 

It doesn’t matter to either of them until someone asks J.T. if he was voting for Liberty despite their history, and he says yes and then something else, and everyone talks about it.

Everyone agrees that he says “yes”, but then the story starts varying in the sentence afterwards, and that is the part that really causes the issues, and it’s the one that leads to Liberty crying into Toby’s shoulder in the middle of third period. She has to pull him into the girl’s bathroom in the science hall, the one nobody really uses during classes.

They’re sitting on the floor of the handicapped stall, and Toby’s attention is split between how weird it feels to be in the girls bathroom and the words that Liberty is mumbling, stuff about J.T. sending mixed signals and maybe secretly hating her and everything else that’s wrong about the two of them these days.

“What’s wrong with me?” she sobs, and the way it echoes off of the graffitied tile of the bathroom makes Toby cringe a bit.

“Nothing, not really. You have bad taste in poetry,” Toby lies. He loves her poetry selections. Every once in a while, she’d print out some pieces that she likes, and would pass them along. All of his World History friends thought they were love letters, but the poems were worth the jeers he got for carrying a vanilla scented envelope.

“Fine, I’ll stop giving them to you,” Liberty huffs, looking less than comforted. Toby backtracks as quickly as possible, trying to remember every little detail about crises Liberty told him.

“Liberty. What do you need? A shoulder to cry on? Someone to tell you that you’re amazing? Someone to make out with to drown out the pain with my A Plus kissing skills? Tell me what you need, and I will do it.”

“You’re so sweet,” she says, crying even harder. He can’t tell if that’s good or bad so he just waits it out before she gets enough air in her lungs to continue, “Can I rant to you? I know I do that a lot, and sometimes I feel like so much of our time is spent with just me complaining, and I hate th-”

“Rant away,” he says, trying to quash down whatever feeling is inside, the one that makes him think of wedding rings and forever and things he knows he can’t have. Liberty smiles at him, and it just gets worse.

“I think I’m an idiot. A dumb, dumb idiot who can’t do the right thing. A stupid piece of shit who can’t function,” Liberty starts.

“Untrue, but continue,” he says, and the eye roll she gives him is enough to make them both smile a bit.

“I had a kid. An entire human. I had a kid with J.T., I had a capital R relationship with him. He doesn’t think I’m worth the time of day. He even told Alyssa that the only reason he was voting for me was because he knew I yell at him if I didn’t, and that just _isn’t true_ , because so much of the time, I feel like I can’t talk to him. I’m _embarrassed_ , Toby. J.T., my first crush, had a baby with me and dated me and lost his virginity to me, and the only reason he’s voting for me is because he thinks I’m the crazy one. And I don’t know if I’m dumb or secretly crazy, but that’s not me, right? I’m not crazy?” she rants, tears spilling down her face, and Toby can’t really follow her mind and where it’s going, so he makes a blind guess.

“You aren’t crazy. You two have been through a lot, and if he said that, then he’d be seriously underestimating how much he loves you and how awesome you are.”

“Loved,” Liberty corrects, and he can hear the bitterness in her voice as loud as day.

“He loves you, no matter what. Even if it’s not romantic anymore, even if you’ve been apart forever, J.T. isn’t the kind of guy who rewrites history. You are a part of him. He knows that, you know that,” Toby rants, and he can feel his own mind go bleary with the stress of holding everything in his hands like this.

“I know… it’s just hard to believe sometimes. The fact that this is my life is hard to believe sometimes,” she says and Toby nods heartily, knowing that feeling deep in his soul.

“And J.T. might’ve said something totally different. Someone told me today that he told Alyssa that he’d vote for you because you were so good in bed. Another told me that he said yes because he wanted the use it as a start of the Get Liberty Back campaign. Someone _else_ said-”

“I get it, that story is highly variable, I shouldn’t turn it into a self esteem thing, I get it.”

“You interrupted me before my favorite one, Lib!” he says, and she looks mildly curious for a second before wiping a stray tear off her cheek and turning to him with a smile.

“What is it?”

“That he said yes because… are you ready for this? Because he thinks I’m hot, and since I’m your running mate, he figured he’d vote for you too,” Toby says, and soon he and Liberty are laughing in the girls bathroom, letting the tears dry as they exchange crazier and crazier theories on what J.T. _really_ said.

They’re interrupted with an announcement on the school intercom with the results, and they get thrown into another peal of laughter when they find out that they’ve won. For one, echoing moment, everything is somehow fine.

They do get detention for missing class, but it’s one hundred percent worth it.


	4. Chapter 4

Toby’s friendship with J.T. is 100% intended to be casual, and he somehow fails to keep it as chill as intended, because he has the displeasure of watching the Mia/J.T. romance unfold in awkward detail. Every step makes his mind anticipate Liberty’s reactions, from J.T.’s initial crush to the saccharine details of their first date. 

It’s worse because he watches Liberty react badly on her own time, with scowls and the occasional breakdown beneath the bleachers. It’s an ongoing joke between the two of them that all of the usual teenage makeout spots are the places where they decide to become blubbering messes. 

J.T., on some level or another, knows that Toby and Liberty are so close they might as well share one soul, and it gives all of his Mia Stories an undertone of sadism, like he knows he’s hurting Toby when he hurts Liberty.

It’s like he’s putting all of his mean energy into Liberty, and giving all of his remaining kindness to Mia and her kid. Toby doesn’t stop him, he just lets J.T. let it all out. Better that he tosses it all on Liberty’s surrogate instead of Liberty herself.

Liberty does the same thing, ranting about J.T. and his transgressions, from dirty looks to rumors that he said something nasty. There were enough of both going around, seeing as J.T. apparently can’t keep his eyes off of her when they’re in the same room, and there’s a quiet fascination among the students with that tumultuous relationship, which leads to a worrying amount of gossip.

The person Toby pities most, however, has to be Mia. He knows that J.T. is in love with Liberty who’s in love with J.T. who’s just trying to keep his heart from being broken when it’s already been shattered by his own mistakes.

Mia is the only innocent party, seeing as she has yet to make the other’s mistakes, like falling for your best friend’s future wife (Toby), selling drugs out of love and subsequently overdosing (J.T.), or just being too much for the tight air of Degrassi (Liberty). Something about it made him want to comfort her, to tell her to get out _now_ , since she’s too quiet and too calm to let herself get destroyed by this poisonous drama.

He doesn’t comfort her, because he doesn’t even know her. Not really, at least.

The only time they ever hang out alone is that one time, when he’s organizing a bake sale for student council, and Liberty has the flu, so he has to get help from outside sources. He asked someone who asks someone who gets Mia behind the table with him, and they get to trade niceties while selling his mom’s cookies. 

He even gets some of the J.T./Mia story from Mia’s point of view, which includes a lot more stories about her kid, which makes Toby’s heart ache because he _knows_ things about the situation. It also includes some weird comments about Liberty that raise Toby’s lovestruck eyebrows, like her “refusing to tutor him” (not true) and “not being over him” (true but incomplete).

“What were they like? When they weren’t fighting, or those stories he told me, about how bad it was… how good was it?” she asks, quiet and deliberate as the activity in front of the table stalls. He knows what she’s really asking: “how much should I worry about this?”

“They were, uh, something special,” he says, trying to tell her the truth without totally freaking her out, “It was pure energy. In good ways and bad ways. When they were happy, it was like the sun was shining in your eyes, right? She wrote a poem about it, and it’s kind of the perfect encapsulation of-”

“She writes poems?” Mia asks, a dark twinge in her voice.

“Yeah. Why do you ask?”

“He had a couple of unmarked poems in one of his drawers, and I could understand if he kept some,” she says. He has a vague memory of J.T. showing him a folder of them. Some of them were romantic, some weren’t. He distinctly remembers one being about how much she liked the taste of apples, another about why her favorite number was fourteen.

“Did you ever read them?” he asks.

“No. He swore they were for an old school project, but I… I wondered, I guess. I know now.”

“They might be a school project, I don’t know what specific poems were in that drawer,” he says, trying to cover his own tracks. They both know that those are Liberty’s poems, but there’s the hope that they both cling to, that it wasn’t as serious as it definitely was. 

“How did they get together anyway?” Mia asks, and Toby can barely remember that moment, it feels so long ago. 

“They got detention together, I think. Something over a song, and they got close and uhh, got together. Why do you ask?” says Toby, even though he probably knows the answer.

“Because he won’t tell me. I ask and he just skirts around it. He doesn’t tell me these things, but it’s so _obvious_ , that their thing was so big and even if he hates her now-”

“I don’t think he does,” says Toby. 

“You might be right. But she wrecked him, broke him to pieces. Even if you and Liberty are best friends, you have to see how affected J.T. is by it. How can you just ignore it?” she asks, and she gets into that tone of voice, that especially angry, righteous tone. 

“As the designated shoulder to cry on for both Liberty and J.T., I think I know how affected they are by it. Whether we like it or not, they shaped each other.”

“We?” she asks, light coming into her eyes.

“I don’t like being the shoulder, is all,” Toby says defensively as he tries to put his focus on other parts of the scene, like the cupcakes on the table, or the sophomore guarding the money box like a truly devoted guard dog.

“Is that it? Didn’t you kiss Liberty at-”

“It was spin the bottle!” he says, so clearly wound up by it that Mia can’t help but keep poking.

“Wow, defensive much?” she asks, and in this moment, Toby hates Mia so much, hates her for his own weakness, and he desperately wants to hurt her.

“I don’t like that I kissed my best friend’s girl, okay!” he says, and that’s not why he’s angry necessarily but he knows what a knife those words will be. Toby doesn’t know when he turned so bitter, so cruel, when he started hurting other people because hurting himself wasn’t enough. As if on cue, Mia’s face falls, understanding what he said. He face hardens, and now _she’s_ on the defensive, which feels good in the worst way.

“She’s not his _girl_ anymore,” she says, and the way that she spits the words out makes his head feel weird.

“Just because they aren’t dating doesn’t mean that they aren’t together, Mia. Date him all you want, but Liberty is his and he is Liberty’s, and that won’t fucking change,” he says, and he’s saying to himself and her, two people with love that can’t truly be returned. It’s so out of control, so lost, that he wants to scream. He looks at Mia, with her lips tightened into a dangerous looking line, and he realizes she wants to scream too.

“You are… and asshole. This is all bullshit, and-”

“You know what, Mia? You and I both know that this is something that’s unavoidable. Those two are an asteroid, crashing to earth. Learn to deal or pick a new planet, just don’t lie to yourself, okay?” he says, and people are beginning to stare, so they both know this is over. They try to appear calm, lower their tensed shoulder and schooling their faces into something presentable. Toby understands Mia a bit better in this moment, gets the feeling that she does as much pretending as he does.

“What’s unavoidable,” says Mia, looking sweet as pie and deadly as cyanide, “is the _fact_ that I’m with him. Speculate all you want, but you know that I’m the one he kisses. _I’m_ the one he tells his big news to, the one he calls. Don’t forget it, okay?” 

This moment after her speech is the moment Toby sees the weakness, sees the hesitation in her eyes, the feeling that there’s something wrong that she can’t fix. 

“I won’t,” he says, letting her have this small victory. It doesn’t bring a smile to her face, doesn’t lift the tension in her jaw. 

“Good,” she says, turning back to the bake sale, putting her brave face on while Toby just lets the wave of worry pass over him, the wave that’s accompanied him for too long. He wonders, for a quiet, sad moment, if he’ll ever get used to it.

-

The thing that changes, in those following months, is that people start to _notice_ , which is weird for Toby. He’s never been the type to communicate his feelings or needs that well, so when his dad comes into town and asks if he’s “dating that Liberty girl”, it comes as a shock. The idea that people see it like he sees it is both liberating and validating, because it’s a message to him that he’s not just inventing this in his head. 

When Toby tells his dad that no, he and Liberty aren’t dating, his dad manages to shock and validate him even more.

“Damn. Ever since I met her I wondered. You two seem like you’d fit.”

Toby almost wants to cry, he loves this so much. He asks his dad for more info, because this is like water to a starving man, it’s all the proof he needs to know that he’s not absolutely insane.

“I dunno, you two always seemed to be close. Even when you didn’t call her a friend… I mean, remember that one time, there was some fair or academic thing, and I was taking you?”

Toby doesn’t remember, but he nods anyway.

“You two ran into each other, and J.T. wandered off because of cooties, or some dumb thing, and you were kinda stuck with her? Not really, truly stuck, but she sat down at our picnic table and didn’t look like she was gonna leave. You two started talking about your science teacher, then what you were learning, and then talking so fast I couldn’t understand a word out of your mouths,” he says, sounding fond enough that Toby’s dumb, love struck mind felt like it sounded like a wedding toast, “It just looked like you two had something there. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable with my, uhh, questions.”

“Don’t worry, dad, it’s fine,” says Toby, feeling a blush rise on his cheeks.

“But you know that I never want to make you feel like-”

“It’s fine. In fact… nevermind,” says Toby, his mind moving so fast that it felt like it could spin out of control if he didn’t hold onto it tight enough.

“What’s up? Do you have something to tell me?” his dad asks, and Toby is on such a sugar high that he finally spills it, he finally lets it go.

“I’m kind of in love with her anyway. It might not happen, but you’re still half right.”

“Why wouldn’t it happen?” his dad asks, and Toby feels his heart warm over his dad’s absolute confidence in him, that Toby is cool enough and handsome enough and _enough_ , period, to get a girl as amazing as Liberty.

“Her and her ex are in a complicated spot. It’s J.T., believe it or not,” says Toby, and his dad looks shocked and confused, which makes Toby kind of want to laugh. 

“J.T.? Doesn’t he like cheerleaders? Liberty was nev-”

“He’s dating a cheerleader now, don’t worry,” says Toby with a bitter laugh, before continuing, “but the two of them are in some weird battle of wills. It’s complicated, and she probably still loves him. Even if she doesn’t... why would she date me?” Toby says, his voice faltering on “me”, and his dad puts a silencing, warm hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t know this girl like you do. But you two, from what I’ve seen and heard, are something special. Don’t talk yourself out of it, kid.”

Toby takes it in, lets the words settle. 

He hugs his dad, and the topic changes to something less charged, but the thoughts on his mind don’t change at all. The weird part, however, is that in the back of his mind, he starts to feel excited, like he’s about to make the jump. 

-

Toby has some upbeat, jazzy Dean Martin song pinging around his head as he walks into school the next day, his mind stuck on a loop of “you two are something special”. He feels like the future is on its way, and some overly grand plans of the future hit him in the chest. He remembers for a second that Liberty’s birthday is in a week or two, and figures he can use that as an excuse for some grand gesture.

There’s a spring in his step and something lovely in the air, and he’s absolutely drunk on his own excitement, on his certainty that this might just work out after all. Quite frankly, he’s so ready to date Liberty Van Zandt that it just might drive him crazy.

Happiness makes the day fly by, he realizes that day when he’s in third period by the time he’s figured out his plan for her birthday. His mind is firing on all cylinders in the absolute best way.

The first step is a dinner between the two of them, not at the Dot or any of the other Degrassi hot spots. Something homemade, something that’s just between the two of them. He thinks that a lasagna dinner while they watch her favorite movie would be a good way to start a relationship.

Dinner, a movie, and then a confession. He’ll pull out her favorite kind of ice cream (Moose Tracks), and while they’re eating, he’ll start.

He doesn’t totally know what he’ll say, but he knows it’ll have something to do with her voice and their friendship and the way that this has been something in the works for years. He can’t string it into a full monologue, not when the teacher is trying to get him to focus, so he figures that for once in his life, Toby Isaacs will wing it. 

-

His plans, like most things in his life, are ruined by his middle school friends, who decide that Liberty _must_ have a rager at someone else’s house. Toby has to start from the beginning, and then when he has half a plan for that, J.T. gets invited and he has to scrap that plan too.

Toby figures that he’ll just wing it.

Or he’ll just wait until the next major celebration Liberty has, like when she inevitably wins an award or does something amazing. Liberty is prone to amazing things, so he finds comfort in the idea that next time will be soon enough.

As long as he gets his chance, he figures, it will all work out for the two of them.

-

Toby’s birthday present for Liberty is a necklace, and he hopes it isn’t too obvious. That’s the only thing on his mind before he enters the Nelson household, and everything proceeds to go to absolute shit.

 _This isn’t anything like Monty’s party_ is his first thought, when he hears the stereo pumping what is literally Liberty’s least favorite song, and sees a couple making out on the couch. He doesn’t really know where to look, because every single thing in that room is, to some degree or another, an awful idea, and he doesn’t know which one to stop.

He wishes, for a pathetic second, that he and Liberty were eating lasagna while watching Pride and Prejudice, and he was hyping himself up for the love confession.

But this isn’t his living room, and the room smells like chips and dips, so Toby resigns to his fate. 

He can’t find Liberty, the crowd is so thick with people, so he just strikes up a conversation with some guy from his Physics class. He keeps his attention on the shifting crowds, trying to catch Liberty’s eyes, but never does. 

The shitty thing is that there’s nothing he can do with this necklace, still being held in his sweaty hands. Liberty is AWOL, Emma is drunk off her ass, and there’s nowhere to put the gifts. He wonders, for a cruel second, if he’s the only one who brought a gift. The thought makes him a bit angry, but he pushes it down and takes a friendly sip from his beer. He doesn’t even know if he wants to find Liberty, because this party is so far away from his best friend that it feels like he’s in another world.

Everything in this is so shitty. The party and his feelings and the way that nothing ever works right in his life. 

Toby then thinks the most dangerous thought, the one that he’s so prone to when his mental health starts failing and the world is forcing him to become a ghost.

 _Fuck it_.

He puts his gift on the kitchen counter, where Liberty may or may not find it, and he gets the tequila. 

Things descend very quickly from there. Everything gets a little bit blurry, and he finds some faceless girl who’s willing to make out with him and he kisses her even if he feels like he might start crying, but he forgets to cry, eventually. 

Kissing is great, his slow, slurred mind thinks.

The clock on the wall ticks, and ticks, and Toby doesn’t know how long he’s been awake, or if he really wants to do this, but it doesn’t matter, because this girl (Nora, right?) is kissing with him and he’s _fine_. So _fine_ that he lets the numbness take over. Soon, J.T. interrupts the two, and starts talking.

When Toby stops kissing and J.T. starts talking, the night gets much more sharper. J.T. talks about meatballs and oatmeal and his love triangle and Toby just gives the advice he knows he should give. He tells the truth. He explains that Liberty is someone you marry, that she’s someone you don’t forget. 

Then, J.T. runs off into the night, and Toby only hopes that Liberty says “no” to J.T. and “yes” to her best friend. He’s drunk enough to hope for the best.

Instead of continuing his kissing, he decides to just hang out with some of his acquaintances, fighting the way he feels on edge. He’s awake, now, and he wants to go home, but he can’t leave without even _seeing_ Liberty, and someone is asking if he’s okay, which is a dumb question because of _course not_ , but he just shrugs and waits without knowing what he’s waiting for.

He gets his answer when he hears the blood curdling screams through the window.


	5. Chapter 5

The thing about hospitals, Toby decides as his skin prickles under the harsh air conditioning of the hospital waiting room he wasted away in the _last time_ J.T. almost died, is that they strip him down to his most elemental forms, even when he’s not the one on the operating table.

All of his middle school friends are there, and it feels so anachronistic and hilariously wrong that he just might cry. He’s already crying anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.

Liberty has blood on her shirt, and Toby hugs her so hard that he’s sure the wet blood transfers onto him too. Emma and Manny cry, and Toby wonders if this is what family is. 

“Do you think he’s going to make it?” asks Emma, carefully and quietly. It’s directed at the air more than any specific person in their pity party.

“I have no idea,” says Liberty, sounding weaker than Toby has ever heard her.

Toby wishes, for the thousandth time that night, that he and Liberty were just having dinner together, like kids in love.

“Is Mia gonna be here soon?” Manny asks, and Toby’s stomach crushes itself. He wants to throw up, wants to be empty. He can feel the beer in him, the chips he ate. He’s so stressed and tired and this can’t be his life, this can’t be his life, this can’t be his life. 

“I don’t know,” says Liberty, and she ducks her head into Toby’s shoulder, and they’re basically clasping each other. Toby wants to ask if he can go to the bathroom, but can’t do it with Liberty crying into his shoulder.

“I just need him to be okay,” says Emma.

Manny taps the floor twice, and the clock ticks, and Toby closes his eyes. He feels so broken, so sluggish. He thinks about the possibility that there’s sand in his brain, or some crazy shit like that. Liberty shakes, and he just hugs her closer. Emma looks him dead in the eyes and blinks, and there’s nothing behind her eyes anymore, she’s seen too much in her lifetime, too much death and sadness and disappointments and _hospitals_.

The doctor comes out, looking almost robotic beneath the light.

“Are there any family members here?” she asks, looking at the group of sobbing teenagers with a wary eye.

“I’m his brother,” says Toby. It’s not totally a lie, he figures.

The doctor beckons him toward her, and he unhooks himself from Liberty and drudges over to her. There’s a silver film coating his eyes, everything is so off. He only hears every other word, he’s too busy nodding on a loop, humming “mhm”s at the pauses.

Coma. ICU. Recovery. Can hear you. Interact. Something that starts with a. Parents? He thinks she said parents. I know you’re going through shock right now but. One. Are you okay? Sir? _Sir_?

“I’m fine,” says Toby.

“As I was saying, you can’t see him now beca…” her words trail out.

“I’m fine,” he repeats, because he feels like she didn’t hear him. People don’t hear him.

There’s a burst behind him, and he cringes so hard he almost drops to the floor. He looks behind him, and expects to see paint-dotted glasses and danger, but it’s just J.T.’s grandma, looking angry more than anything. She takes over the doctor correspondence, and he limps back to the group, feeling like his blood is turning into ice.

“Toby. Toby Isaacs. Is he okay?” Emma asks, putting her hands on his shoulders, looking at his dazed face with a teary sort of concern.

“Yeah. Coma. He-he’ll be back.”

“Thank god,” says Manny, and Toby goes back to sitting in the waiting area, Liberty by his side and thoughts churning in his head. 

“Lib?” he asks, his voice feeling like it was coming from a ghost, or from the starry night sky. He knew there was a sky above the hospital ceiling, and he wished he could see it, if only to get confirmation that this was real.

“Yeah?” she asks back, turning her eyes to him with exhausted nonchalance. 

“I wish things were different,” he says, and there are some tears in his eyes that he can’t comprehend. The life he’s lived has been too big to be comprehended by his weak, teenage mind.

“Same here,” says Liberty, simply and quietly beneath the yellow-green-white lights of the hospital waiting room. 

For the first time since Rick Murray, Toby feels stillness deep within him. It doesn’t last long.

-

J.T.’s in a coma for the next four days, and living without J.T. is like being in a glass box. Toby doesn’t go to school, and he only goes to the hospital for an hour (or less if he’s lucky) a day before he goes back home to just _sit_ , staring off and hoping that energy and happiness will just seep back into him. 

Those three days of stillness are absolutely fascinating, because he watches his life happen but he never really processes any of it. The world passes by so quickly that the daily events of his life feel like a grocery list that he can rattle off without much thought or emotion.

Mia comes home, screaming and mourning even though he’s still alive. Then, Liberty goes into hiding at her house, making midnight visits to J.T.’s grandma’s house to give her support. Someone says that Liberty is “family” and Mia cries so hard that she doubles over. And Toby just watches it. 

Then, in front of his glassy eyes, the punks get arrested, and Liberty attends every hearing they go through. Manny and Emma go back to school holding hands. Toby starts a new anime, some DVDs on loan from Kendra. He barely processes any of the plot points, but he certainly appreciates the art style.

Everyone asks him if he’s okay and the answer is always “not right now”. Everything happens behind a fogged glass window, as far as Toby’s concerned, because nothing feels real. This lasts for three days, and then the fourth day, the day before J.T. wakes up, everything changes.

-

The fact that sun is shining brighter than usual is the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up. His mom had drawn the curtains, so there was no hiding in the dark for him: just the unavoidable glare of the sunlight. He twists his way out of the bed, and every muscle in his body is sore.

He really wants to call Liberty.

It this desperate, primal compulsion, and he can’t ignore it. So half-awake and too depressed to put on his glasses, he opens his phone and types out Liberty’s number from memory.

One ring, another, then another. Then a click, and an exhausted “Hello?”

“Liberty?” he asks, and his voice doesn’t match the way he feels, it’s too energetic and alive.

“Yeah, Toby?” she asks, and he hears the way her voice drags over the vowels, and he knows how she’s feeling, he’s listened to her voice for so long and spent so much time learning the ins and outs of Liberty Van Zandt that he just _knows_. She’s natural to him, like a perfect match.

Like the other half.

“Let’s run away together,” he says.

There’s silence. He can hear the buzz of the phone, the rumble of activity in the room next to her, the room next to him. 

“To where?” she asks, and he knows her answer, he knows _her_. Goddammit, he’s in love with her. This is the most alive he’s felt since J.T. almost died. He and Liberty Van Zandt are getting away from all of it, hand in hand.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s irresponsible,” she says. It’s so _her_ that Toby actually smiles. He doesn’t know the last time he did that, just that it’s been too long.

“Yeah, I know it is. How much time do you need before I pick you up?” 

“Give me thirty minutes,” she says, and he can tell that this is the most alive she’s been too. This is what confidence feels like, this is what making a choice feels like. He’s no longer at the mercy of the hospital equipment, or anything else.

All he packs is a wallet with every cent he could find and a backpack full of food. He’s in the car before he knows it, and he drives like there’s no tomorrow, watching the trappings of his childhood city pass by him as he works his way to Liberty’s house, and when he stops on the street right in front of their perfectly manicured lawn, Liberty is standing on the rich green, holding her own backpack. Toby rolls down his window, and sticks his head out of the window, eyes scrunched beneath the scalding sun.

“What did you bring?” he says/shouts, and then Liberty starts walking towards him, and he feels like this is a dream. It has to be, with all of the sun and the kindness that’s hitting him in the heart.

“Money and my survival kit,” she says, and she gets into the passenger seat like it’s nothing. It’s everything.

“Survival kit?” 

“Money, tools to pick locks, emergency food, general helpful tools. Survival kit.”

Toby is so in love with this girl that he might burst, but he just smiles instead. He starts driving, the light shining in his eyes, and he’s happy in a way that he thought he wasn’t capable of. He thought he had grown out of this unavoidable, sunny sort of joy. It felt like freedom, like flight.

“Want to play music?” he asks. 

“I have some tapes in my survival kit. Audiobook or music?”

“Music,” he says, and she slips a tape in with ease and smoothness, and he feels like he’s breaking free from the hospital and all of the binds. The music that plays is familiar, and he vaguely recognizes it as her summer mixtape. He bops his head along to the music, tapping the steering wheel with his hands alongside the beat, and he pointedly ignores the way that the engine of his car is making a weird noise, because it’s the first hint that this is not a dream.

“Remember when I learned how to drive?” asks Liberty, and he sneaks a glance at her and can see that she’s not as overjoyed as he is, she just looks conflicted. This is Toby’s second true hint that this isn’t a dream.

“Yeah. I don’t think this’ll end the same way,” he says, and his smile drops a bit, because he can see that Liberty is getting more worried by the minute.

“It’s pretty hard to top. Tobes? What if he wakes up and we aren’t there?” she asks, and Toby hea’s another clank of machinery beneath him, and he’s beginning to regret this a little bit. They’re on the outskirts of the city, where there’s not much other than the occasional strip mall.

“Mia can distract him,” he says. He has a vague, out there hope that J.T. has amnesia and forgets that he’s still in love with Liberty.

“You’re right. I just don’t like it,” says Liberty, and she slumps a bit in her seat.

“Fuck that,” says Toby, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying it about, but it feels freeing enough that his lips curl up a bit.

“Yeah. Fuck that,” says Liberty, repeating it with a newfound zeal, and her voice is the sun.

“Fuck that!” Toby says, louder now. He looks at Liberty, and she’s smiling. There’s another clank beneath him, deep in the car, and it’s louder than the ones before. Liberty is too distracted: she’s started to chant “Fuck that” like a mantra, and he’s too distracted by and in love with her that when the final scrape and jump of machinery hits him, he hasn’t prepared for it, and he certainly hasn’t prepared for the way that the car slams to a halt, right on the abandoned road outside the town he grew up in, the town he struggled in.

He’s cursing up a storm, and he ends up scrambling out of the car. Everything is so bright and loud that he only half-processes it: he’ll blink his eyes, and when he opens them, he’s doing something. It’s all on instinct, on the same animal instinct that called Liberty this morning, that started the car and packed those bags.

When his mind catches up with his body, he’s kicking the car over and over and over while his mouth spits curses. It slows as he realizes where he is and what he’s doing, and it all ends with him leaning his head against the wall of the car, tears springing at the edges of his eyes.

Then, he hears the laughter.

It starts slow, at first, like the first sprinkle of rainfall, and then it’s raining cats and dogs, she’s laughing so hard. He laughs a little with her, because he doesn’t want her to be alone in this. 

He sinks to the ground, and the feeling of warm pavement beneath him is oddly comforting. Liberty sits by him, still drenched in the remnants of a good laugh. They share a look, some deep gaze of shared understanding.

Toby doesn’t know who leans forward, but he’s so drunk on sunlight that he doesn’t really care.

Kissing her is just as good as he remembers: it’s sweet and a bit glossy, and he can’t get enough of it. He feels so connected to her, with his hand on her jaw and hers in his hair. They shift so they’re facing each other, and the kiss deepens. Toby thinks this is either a dream or heaven or something else, anything other than reality, because he’s happy in a way he hasn’t been in a while. He’s smiling against her lips, and she’s smiling against his. 

If this is heaven, he doesn’t know why he spent so much time being afraid of dying.

“I brought food,” he says, and he pulls away and looks into her eyes, at the way they seem dazed and so lovely. 

“Did you bring lasagna?” she asks softly. Toby almost breaks out into tears on the spot.

 

“You know I do.”

-

They spend the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon like that, after they drag Toby’s car off the road and use their jackets as picnic blankets. They’re cell phones are going off like crazy, so they just put them in the car and shut the door while they pig out.

They eat, and more importantly, they kiss a little. It’s all about spontaneity, when they kiss, all about feeling the moment and letting it carry into a kiss. Toby says all kinds of dumb things, centimeters away from Liberty’s lips. He says that her lips are like sugar, that her voice is like music. She’s also just as reckless, she tells him that she’s always wondered what this would be like, that his hair is softer than she could’ve ever imagined. He’s never been this deliriously happy.

The hours pass, and the sun moves above then, hiding behind trees and clouds, but always staining the hours with yellow and white. 

It’s 4pm when Liberty looks at him with exhausted eyes and says that they should go home. He says that he agrees, because the idea of saying “no” to her causes him physical pain. He calls the tow truck and she calls Manny, the only person in their life who’s not going to lecture them or snitch. 

It all ends quietly, with the two of them napping on each other in the back seat of Manny’s car, and it’s the kind of peace, the kind of stillness, that Toby has always dreamed about.

Then J.T. wakes up.

-

When J.T. wakes up, the sun is shining so loudly that the rays feel almost thick on Toby’s skin. He walks into the hospital after receiving a frantic phone call from Emma, and Toby can’t feel sad or angry or overjoyed, because he’s slipped back into that druglike high of heady indifference.

The day before feels like a lovely dream, and it just might be. It all seemed to work on a dream logic, but everyone in Toby’s life is telling him that he was out of the house, having his car break down and eating all of the leftovers with Liberty. His mom is a little bit peeved at him for his disappearance, but no one has the energy to be truly mad at any of them, or the way that they’re grieving/waiting.

That may be what Toby hates about all this: all of them, Emma, Manny, Toby, and Liberty, have to feel both emotions and feel them the right way, whatever that means.

They have to be hopeful and positive for the fact that J.T. might wake up, while also being quietly respectful and teary over the fact that he might not. It was such a fifty/fifty tossup, and they had to split their souls into each possibility. 

Emma, weirdly enough, was great at it. This experience made her shine, in a weird way. Toby jokes to Liberty that if Emma thought she was good at planning birthday parties, she’d be fantastic at planning funerals. Then, like clockwork, Liberty reminds Toby that Emma certainly isn’t good at planning birthday parties.

It’s a tired joke, both Toby’s used to it, he finds comfort in it. Now that Emma isn’t planning a funeral, he needs a new joke. These are the little changes after J.T. wakes up.

The whole squad is in the waiting room before he gets there, and he has a moment of appreciation of the motley crew: Manny, Emma, Liberty, and Mia. Then Toby. They have two eating disorders, three pregnancies, and countless breakups between them, and they somehow ended up in this room, waiting for a doctor to come out and explain to them what the fuck is going on.

“Hey Mia,” he says, softly and with care. It hits him that Mia’s about to be broken up with. 

“Hey Toby,” she says, and when she looks into his eyes, he remembers that one conversation they had, scathing and sharp at the baking sale. He can tell that she’s thinking about the exact same thing.

“Sorry,” he says. She nods soberly.

“I’m sorry too. What matters is that he’s awake. All that teenage bullshit is behind us, alright?” she asks, and she puts out her hand.

“I sure hope so,” he says, and he shakes her hand while forcing a smile.

-

The doctor says that they can visit him one at a time, and he can’t really talk more than a couple of rasped words, but he can understand what’s being said. He can’t move too much and he certainly can’t leave the bed. Now all that’s left is deciding who goes first.

“Okay, you guys, here’s my idea. I think we can triage it, right? Mia’s dating him, so she goes first,” says Emma in her full organizing mode, and Mia preens in the background while she continues, “then Toby, because of how close they’ve always been. Then Liberty, because of your… history, and the fact that she was the one who found him, so there’s definitely stuff they’ll need to talk about. Manny is gonna get Paige and company on the phone, since they all want to wish him well, and then I’ll go last so I can tell him to sleep, because I’m confident that he won’t unless there’s _some_ peer pressure.”

“What about his family?” Liberty asks, softly, and Mia’s eyes narrow because of the whole “Liberty is family” squabble of two days ago. It seems so long ago.

“His Grandma already visited, and she has some messages for… some of you that I’ll, um, deliver privately. The rest of the family is going to talk to him tonight on the phone. Anymore questions?” asked Emma. For a moment, Toby feels proud of her, because she’s kind of in her element. 

“So can I go? Or do I have a message?” asks Mia. He can see the anxiety grow in her, can see how her hands get jittery and how she doesn’t know where to put them.

“No messages. Just check in with the doc, and visit away,” she says, and Mia’s out of there like a rocket. Then Emma turns to the rest of the crowd, her eyes wide and expectant, a commiserating look even though Toby doesn’t know what they’re specifically commiserating over. Mia? J.T.? Both of them?

“Now… messages,” she says. She’s in full planner mode, everything carrying a comforting, mechanical tone. “J.T.’s grandma wants you guys to know that we are all like family, and that she’s so glad J.T. has us in our lives. She also thinks that he’s going to go through some rapid changes, she says that he’s gonna, um, grow up fast. And that we all need to cope. She said to tell Toby to quote unquote ‘man up and do the right thing’. I’m assuming, Tobes, that you know what she’s referring to, because I have no idea.”

“I think I have a vague idea,” he says, his stomach dropping and spilling out over the waiting room floor. He’s has to give Liberty up, he thinks, he has to be a better friend to both of them.

“Liberty, she wants you to know that, this is another quote, you ‘have nothing to be afraid of’. That one is a bit easier to figure out,” she says, and Toby has a moment of shock over how much of an open secret J.T. and Liberty must be, how many people just _know_ that they’re so far gone for each other.

Liberty “mhm”s, but her eyebrows are creased, looking as if she’s deciphering the message like it’s a puzzle.

“Anything for me?” Manny asks, her voice lifted, as if she wants desperately to lighten up the sober mood of the room.

“Yeah, actually. She says that out of anyone, you can make J.T. laugh, and he needs some of that,” says Emma, and Manny looks absolutely touched in a way that warms Toby’s nostalgic heart.

There’s a moment of silence, easy and familial, before Tob gets so overwhelmed with his own thoughts that he lets himself speak.

“Do you think J.T. is strong enough to break up with her? Physically and emotionally?” he asks.

“Wait, he’s breaking up with her?” Liberty asks, and everyone looks at her like she has ten eyes. Toby realizes, with a harsh slam to his stomach, that Liberty has no idea. She hasn’t seen the longing looks, hasn’t listened to the rants about oatmeal and meatball subs and _holy shit_ she doesn’t know about the fact that J.T. was walking to confess his love and _fuckfuckfuck_ Toby _kissed_ her and-

“We think so. That relationship was on its last legs, and I think he wants… other things,” says Manny.

“Manny, Mia isn’t here, we don’t need to, like, speak in code.”

Toby looks over to Liberty, and sees her wide eyed stare, like she’s in another world.

“What?” she asks, soft and confused.

“J.T. is kind of in love with you. He was about to try to get back together with you, I heard him talk about it,” says Manny, ever helpful. Toby gets the feeling that he’s going to faint, and then Liberty whips her head to head, sharp enough that her hair flails around her head, frizzy and crazy-looking in the harsh lights.

“Did you know about this?” she says, almost in a whisper. Her voice sounds absolutely dangerous, and Toby never learned how to lie to her, so he just lets the truth slip out.

“Yeah. Right before he got, umm… he told me about it.”

“You piece of _shit_ ,” whispers Liberty, and her eyes are redder, angrier than he’s ever seen them. He wants to cry. Liberty turns around to Manny and Emma, and says “I’m going to take a break.” 

Then she storms out, and he can see her feverishly swipe at her crying eyes just as she leaves the doorway.

“Tobes?” asks Manny, so confused that it makes Toby want to smile a bit.

“I may have kissed her. A couple of times,” he says, and he can feel the acrid taste of guilt and self hatred on his tongue.

“Why?” Emma asks, looking so utterly bewildered, and it hits him that lots of them have never seriously considered a future where those two don’t end up together in some way or another.

“Because I’m in love with her,” he says, looking out of the door that she left.

“Oh,” says Manny under her breath. They’re shocked still, stuck in the ice of the confession, until the silence is broken by Mia, walking out with irregular, grief-stricken steps. Emma pulls herself together, even if it looks a little bit weak.

“How did it go?” she asks.

“He broke up with me. On his fucking deathbed.”

“It’s not his deathbed anymore,” says Manny, still quiet.

Mia doesn’t even give it a response, she just walks out.

“Toby? You’re up,” says Emma. Toby wishes, for a dark second, that he was dead.


	6. Chapter 6

Toby walks into the sterile room, and wonders how fucked up his life is going to be from now on. Liberty hates him, hell, _everybody_ hates him, and now J.T. is going to talk about how much he hates him and-

“Hey buddy,” says J.T., and his voice sounds like it’s been through a shredder. Toby wonders how he managed to break up with Mia when his voice could barely say “hello”. 

Never underestimate the tenacity of J.T. in love, thinks Toby, and he tries to push positivity.

“I know I’m supposed to do most of the talking, you sound like you’ve been through hell. I mean, I guess you have. What’s something happy? I, umm… cookies are good. I like cookies, do you?” asks Toby, and despite all of the positive energy he’s trying to bring, his thoughts don’t stop trampling over him.

“You suck at this,” rasps J.T., and Toby laughs. _Boy, you don’t know the half of it_ , he thinks.

“I know. I suck at being happy, so it’s not an issue with you, just me. It’s a weakness of mine, positivity. Being happy and making people happy, the two things I never learned to do, haha,” says Toby, and he tries to play it off as a joke, even though it’s just those intrusive thoughts slipping out of his mouth.

“Bullshit,” says J.T., and Toby feels even more fucked up than before, because J.T. doesn’t know anything about the last week, and he obviously doesn’t know anything about Toby.

“This last week has been wild, man,” say Toby, leaning back into the attempt at lightheartedness. “Emma’s been, like, a star. Organizing everything, listening to everyone’s stuff. And Mia, uh… you know about Mia. I would’ve told her, but I felt like that was your news to give. I would’ve told Liberty too, but I know how much you like grand gestures, so I figured you’d want to make that a big event.”

“Good instinct.”

“And Liberty hates me anyway, because I didn’t tell her and she sort of found out from Emma-”

“What?” J.T. asks, and this is the most emotional he’s been through this whole encounter.

“She doesn’t believe it, and she won’t until it comes from you. There’s a chance she thinks that this is all a dream, it’s… complicated. Very, very complicated. That’s probably the word that would best sum up this week, I’d say. Just complication after complication. Mia and Liberty and _me_ , it’s all so complex and-”

“Bro,” says J.T., stopping Toby in his tracks. His hands fall from the air, where they’d been gesticulating, and they hang limp at his sides. 

“I’m glad you’re back,” says Toby. It’s the simplest sentiment he could find.

“Me too,” says J.T., and they have a moment of shared silence, and the years that Toby’s known J.T. play in his mind like a highlight reel. Everything they’ve shared together feels so big, so deep that Toby couldn’t even begin to comprehend it.

“I don’t know what else to say.”

“I get that.”

“Liberty should be seeing you next, Emma made a schedule. Are you ready for that?” asks Toby, hoping that Liberty was back from her “break”.

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I’m there, I guess,” says J.T., pushing himself.

“Love confessions are gonna be kind of hard with that sort of barrier,” remarks Toby.

“Short and sweet,” says J.T.

“Is that my cue to leave?”

“Mhm,” says J.T., and Toby smiles as he ducks out of the room, trying to catch his breath, let his mind get back to pace. 

Next thing he knows, he’s in the lobby, with three girls looking at him expectantly. Emma looks worried in a motherly way, Manny looks insanely curious, and Liberty looks like she’s about to have the biggest morning of her life while fighting a hangover (at least, that’s the effect of her flushed face and red rimmed eyes, and her hair frizzed as wildly as possible).

“How will I get home?” Toby asks, because his mind is pretty blank, and he just knows that he wants to be anywhere but here.

“Call your mom?” Manny asks. 

Liberty just stands up and marches past him, refusing to cast a look over her shoulder, refusing to exhibit any sign of doubt or care. 

“I’ll do that,” says Toby, and he walks out himself, out of the hospital doors into the world. He dials his mom, and he stares into the sun, wondering how the hell he got here.

-

“Toby! The phone’s for you!” yells his mom from across the house, and it break him out of his reverie. He’d spent the afternoon looking through the yearbooks that tracked his entire life with J.T., from the year they first met to just this last year, where they all looked so tired in every single picture.

He pulls himself out of bed and walks across the halls, feeling nothing but the fuzz of carpet beneath his socks.

His mom hands him the phone, and goes right back to business around the house, leaving Toby and whoever’s on the other line.

“Toby?” the voice asks, and he can tell that it’s Emma from muscle memory alone.

“Emma! What’s going on? Is everything, uh, okay?” he asks, remembering the mood of the hospital waiting room when he left it.

“I just got home. Talked to J.T.” 

He can tell that she’s holding something in, waiting for some cue to tell whatever news is hanging on her tongue.

“Is he doing okay?” 

“Yeah. He’s worried about you, weirdly enough. Apparently it’s now my job to make sure you eat, so go do that sometime soon,” she sas, and Toby looks down at his grumbling stomach and realizes that yeah, he hasn’t eaten in hours. Guess J.T. was a bit more intuitive than expected.

“Anything else happening?” Toby asks, because he’s confident that whatever news there is, it’s much bigger than himself.

“How, like, in love was he with Liberty the last time you guys talked about it?” Emma asks, and Toby has a much better idea of where this conversation is going.

“Umm… He was talking about how Liberty is like, essential? It was some weird metaphor that was my fault, it made more sense at the time. If I had to compare it to anything, it’s like… he was just very confident about going back to her. Like he made his decision and he knew it was right,” Toby says, trying to push down any bad feelings that sprung to his unhelpful brain.

“That kind of makes sense… J.T. has definitely been a bit more, uh, enthusiastic than we expected him to be after he woke up. Like wedding ring enthusiastic.” Toby’s eyes almost bug out of his head when Emma says that, and he has to fight some kind of ungainly yelp at the words “wedding ring”.

“So he’s planning a wedding? Right now, after he woke up?” Toby asks, figuring that that’s a lot less loaded question than “why would he do that to me”, which has no answer.

“He didn’t say the word wedding, if that’s what’s freaking you out,” says Emma, and Toby feels a little bit more crazy.

“What did he say, then?”

“Love, definitely. Making it work, also. He wants me to help him out, but he won’t tell me what he’s planning.”

Toby’s mind runs through the options. Proposal? Promposal? Something else entirely that doesn’t have anything to do with the never ending chant of “wedding ring, wedding ring, wedding ring” in Toby’s head?

“So you figured marriage because…?” 

“Because I saw Liberty after she left the room and she looked so happy, and when I saw him _he_ looked overjoyed, and Manny said some things too, and it just… I know how you feel about Liberty, Tobes, but I don’t think you can win this one,” she says. It’s so plain, when she says it like that, so baldly emotional and undeniable.

“And you called to tell me that?”

“Yeah. That’s why I called,” she says, and Toby feels frozen in time. 

“I know I don’t have a chance, Emma,” he says.

“I don’t think that’s true, Toby,” she says, putting his name at the end of the sentence with a motherly sort of aggression. He knows he can’t fight against that, so he takes a deep breath, and tries to fight every animalistic urge in his body to just hang up right now.

“To be frank, this is none of your business. I’m _dealing_ with it,” he says.

“How?” she asks, and a streak of worry shines through her voice. He realizes that Emma remembers middle school just as well as he does, and she remembers him passing out on the court. She remembers how he _deals_ with things.

“I’m watching anime and crying,” he says, carefully omitting that while he also isn’t eating while he does those things, but it’s totally under control.

“I don’t know how to help you.”

Silence. Toby doesn’t know how to respond, and Emma doesn’t know how to add on. They just stand together, listening to the sound of ambiance from the other line.

“Emma? Thanks for your help. I’m glad you care about me,” he says.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” she says, and her voice cracks with helplessness.

“And I’ll help you. Bye,” he says, feeling so numb that his knees might buckle under him at any moment.

“Bye. Eat a good dinner, alright?”

“Alright,” he says, and he hangs up.

For the sake of friendship, he follows her instructions and eats spaghetti with vegetables on the side. He manages to keep most of it down, which becomes the great success of the night.

-

Toby visits the hospital the next day, hoping against hope that things would be better than the last time he was there.

Things are different. Not better or worse, just different.

The first major change was that Emma greets him with a hug, asking him almost immediately if he’d eaten dinner the night before. Toby feels absurdly proud that he didn’t have to lie. Granted, he was hoping that she wouldn’t ask him about breakfast, because he skipped that, but he was taking it one step at a time.

“Liberty’s in there,” says Sean, who had decided to accompany Emma for support. He looks totally out of his element in the too-clean room, which offers Toby some weird sort of comfort. 

“How’re they doing?” he asks, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He wonders if Sean knows about the whole drama, before reasoning that even if he knows about it, he certainly doesn’t understand it.

“Good, last time I checked. They’ve been telling each other what they’ve been doing after they broke up. Catching each other up on family drama and all that.”

“So he’s gotten better at talking?” Toby asks while hoping that J.T. wouldn’t get suspicious over how much of Liberty’s non-J.T. life involved Toby’s friendship.

“Much better. He’s a force of nature, for sure,” says Emma. 

“That much can’t be denied. Should, I, uhh…” Toby trails off, gesturing to the door. He realizes that J.T. might want to spend the visiting time with the love of his life rather than his friend for life. 

“I don’t think you two will have time to visit, if that’s what you’re asking,” says Emma, simply and with a sad note underscoring her words. “But if you need some company… I know I do. We can have lunch in the hospital cafeteria,” says Emma, and Toby cringes a bit at the thought of food, but he still nods. He needs company more than he need hunger, he figures.

Next thing he knows, he and Emma are downstairs, on either side of a booth, both staring neat, bland sandwiches on their trays. Toby suspiciously eyes the Jello on the side, before idly tearing the crusts off the sandwich in a casual avoidance of the elephant in the room.

“It’s weird that we only started talking again because of J.T. getting stabbed,” says Emma as plainly as possible. 

“Yeah, I’d say so. But at least we’re talking,” Toby says in response.

“I think we have more in common than you think,” says Emma, and she follows Toby’s cue and starts taking the crusts off her sandwich.

“I mean, yeah. We are both the nerdy friend to boisterous, funny forces of personality, with weird family situations,” says Toby, thinking on her statement and being hit in the face with the truth of it, with the absolute weirdness of their similarities.

“Everyone has a weird family situation, though. J.T. lives with his grandma, and Manny used to live with me. Sean lived on his own. I feel like it’s less of a Toby and Emma thing and more of a Degrassi thing,” counters Emma. She takes a thoughtful, struggling bite of her sandwich. 

“We also have food issues,” says Toby, putting it out in the open, addressing the elephant in the room. His sandwich doesn’t have a bite in it yet.

“Yeah, food issues galore,” says Emma, laughing with no humor in her voice.

“Remember when I fainted during that wrestling meet?” Toby asks, and it feels so long ago, like it was a totally different person who experienced all of that, even if it was still affecting Toby to this very moment.

“Who doesn’t? It really freaked us all out,” says Emma, and her fingers fidget a bit around her spoon, which she isn’t using for food or for anything else.

“I never got therapy for that,” says Toby quietly. Emma nods.

Toby takes a bit of the sandwich, and it seems like every muscle in his body has to work on overdrive just to get that one bite in his mouth, down his throat, and into his stomach. 

“Are you working on it?” she asks.

“Are you?”

The silence is deafening.

-

Toby has to go back to school the next week, with a couple of caveats: he has a standing appointment with the school counselor after school every day, and his mom reminds him three times a day that if it’s needed, he can leave school. Liberty is still out, splitting her time between therapy and being by J.T.’s bedside, catching up and getting back those missed months.

It leaves Toby, Manny, and Emma, back at Degrassi and still feeling shaken. 

The first thing that Toby feels when he walks through those doors for the first time since that crazy, dizzying night, is that Degrassi is a lot smaller than he remembered. The hallways are more cramped, the posters more sparse. 

Emma and Manny are waiting near the entrance for him, and he greets them with a wave, soundly walking over to them with a sort of ease that seemed outside of his body, unnatural in his legs and his swaying arms.

“Ready for your first day back?” Toby asks.

“Not at all,” answers Manny, laughing a bit with her words.

“How much do they know?” he asks, gesturing vaguely to a mass of students passing by.

“He was in a coma, and he’s out of it. He got stabbed and he broke up with Mia. Basically, they know what Mia knows. She went back to school a couple of days ago, so she got the brunt of it… the only questions you should get are asking for confirmation on what she said and your personal take on the, uh, events,” says Emma. 

“And by personal take, you mean…?”

“The petty stuff. Why he broke up with Mia, why Liberty’s not back yet, why he was outside anyway, how you think he’s _really_ doing.”

“I don’t want to answer any of those,” says Toby, eyebrows creased with worry and anxiety beginning to bloom again around the edges and crevices.

“Now’s the time to make some shit up,” says Manny, heroically clapping Toby on the shoulder.

“But J.T. was always the creative one! I couldn’t make up anything that would work,” says Toby.

“Just talk about yourself. About how you feel, about where you were when it happened. It’ll all be fine, Tobes,” Emma says. There’s another bustle of kids on their way to class, noisily reminding Toby that he has somewhere to be.

“Yeah, you’re right. What could go wrong?”

-

“Is it weird for you that your girlfriend was like, the one who found J.T.?” his lab partner asks, and he doesn’t know her _name_ let alone why she’d ask that, of all things. His mind cooks up some brilliant diatribe about how he is single, thankyouverymuch, and it’s certainly not her business, and a desperate plea to just leave him alone. It hits him that he’s probably not ready to be back at school if one question sends him on such an extreme tailspin.

He opts for decorum instead. “Huh?”

“Yeah, Liberty found J.T., right?”

“Liberty’s not my girlfriend,” he says, and it doesn’t even hurt anymore, he’s thought the words so many times. Is that progress?

“Oh, sorry. That’s just what people have been saying… don’t trust the gossip, I guess. I bet Liberty didn’t even find J.T., because that would be so-”

“That part’s true.”

“Really? That sounds so dramatic. When Mia said it I thought it was just her lashing out, projecting her feelings and whatnot, but…” she trails off. 

“Nope, that’s accurate. A lot of it sounds fake, but I was there, and it was- I… it’s really hard to describe. Dramatic is a good word for it,” says Toby, and he has to hold back from snapping and releasing all his angst on this poor girl.

“Why was he even out there?” she asks, and yeah, Toby’s going to snap, he can’t handle it. He feels the words leave his lips before he even wonders if it’s a good idea to spill this much to a near stranger.

“Because he wanted to get back together with Liberty, because he’s an- he marched out, ready to confess his undying love or whatever, and then he got stabbed. That’s why he was out there. He almost fucking died because… because he was in love with Liberty. Is in love with Liberty. Went to his deathbed for her, and he- I hate that I would- never mind. Sorry.”

“You would what?” she asks, eyes wide and hungry. This is probably the scoop of the decade. Toby doesn’t have enough self preservation skills to not feed her curiosity.

“I’d do the exact same thing. If anyone’s worth getting stabbed over, it’s Liberty Van Zandt. J.T. learned that one the hard way by actually, uhh.. Getting stabbed. This is a weird rant, I’m sorry.”

“It’s a fascinating one, no matter how weird it is. Please keep going,” she says, and she’s completely abandoned the lab equipment. Now, she just looks Toby straight on, her blue eyes glittering beneath the too-bright lights of the room and her hair looking a bit like a squirrel’s nest.

“They’re going to get married. They aren’t engaged, but like… fuck. That’s it.”

“Huh.”

Silence hangs in the air. Toby wonders if this is the start of a beautiful friendship, or if this is just a stranger who wants gossip. She stares expectantly at him, but something passes her eyes, like a quiet disappointment. 

He watches the moment that she realizes that she’s not going to get anything else out of this encounter, can see it with crystal clear vision. She turns back to her work with a soft frown on her face, and it hits Toby that he’s not going to get anything out of this either. 

It also hits Toby that he just may be alone now. Liberty hates him, J.T. has no reason to be around him anymore… no one has a reason, now that he thinks about it. It feels like a black hole, this sensation of being absolutely and utterly alone. 

He leaves the classroom, not even bothering to warn a teacher. He knows his mom is going to get a phone call soon, but he also knows that he doesn’t want to handle this revelation in a crowded room, so he slips out into the hallway.

It’s almost empty, since class in in session. He walks down _that spot_ in the hallway, the one with the yellow paint and the blood and Rick’s terrifying voice lingering in the air. He walks past the detention room where Liberty and J.T. had their first, past the science room where he spent so many sophomore year lunches.

Toby doesn’t know how he feels alone and tired and nostalgic and outside of his body all at once.

He leaves the school, in a daze, and pulls out his phone. He dials Liberty, almost on autopilot, because if anyone knows what to do it’s-

“Toby?”

“Liberty! Oh my god, Liberty, I- I don’t know what to say, I’m just- I’m, um… I might be having a breakdown right now? Or a panic attack? Or both. I’m sorry for calling, Liberty, I know you hate me-”

“I don’t hate you. I just got mad, but that doesn’t mean I hate you.”

“I hate me,” he says, and the truth sounds so bald and unavoidable, and all the lights are too bright.

“Where are you?” she asks, and he can hear a rustle and a murmur through the phone, not enough to know what’s going on but just enough to know that something is happening.

“Outside of Degrassi. First day back and I already fucked up and-”

“Stop the self pity spiral. I’m picking you up. Which store should I meet you at?” she asks, and Toby is so fucking confused, because what? Her mind is light years ahead of his, and he’s used to that, but this feels like another step.

“What?” 

“You can’t just stand outside school. You’ll have nothing to focus on but your self pity spirals. If you go to the convenience store two blocks away, you can at least try to focus on different condom brands or the ingredient label on the chips,” she says, like it’s obvious, and Toby starts walking in that direction, his body working on pure autopilot.

He feels vaguely like he’s walking through a tunnel when he starts the journey to the convenience store, which is simultaneously the longest, most excruciating journey he’s ever been on and as simple as a walk in the park.

He gets to the convenience store, his feet dragging a bit like he’s a zombie. The ring of the bell on the door reverberates painfully in his mind, and he beelines to the freezer, opening it up to examine his ice cream options.

He stares at the wrappers and cartons, not reading the words and instead looking at the bright primary colors splashed across his eyes. The chill slowly crept onto his face, crawling over his skin, now more sensitive from crying. He’s sure that people are watching him, he can feel the eyes boring holes in the back of his skull, but he can’t feel the urge to look back.

“Jesus christ, Tobes, you look like you just got hit by a truck,” he hears, echoing like a memory. He can’t fit an image to it, and he’s not sure that it ever happened, but it makes him smile nonetheless. He closes the freezer door and looks over his shoulder. No one is there, which irks him, but he tries not to let it faze him. 

He drifts over to the next freezer door, which has frozen meals. He realizes that he must look high, like he’s absolutely buzzed out on something. His eyes drag over every single carton, until he hears the _whoosh_ of an opening door behind him. He turns around again, and this time he sees Liberty for real, looking a bit winded and rushed, her panicked eyes shining in the light. 

He closes the door, but stays still in his shoes- like they’re planted to the floor. Liberty walks in his direction, slowly with her arms out in front of her, like she’s approaching a scared, dangerous animal.

“Toby?” she says, and her voice is soft in that bittersweet way that he rarely ever got to hear.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and _oh_ , there are tears in his eyes all of the sudden. 

“I know.”

She steps closer. A tear falls down his face, leaving a scalding hot track behind. Another step closer. 

“I’m so, so sorry,” he says again, and Liberty catches him in a hug. Her grip is tight and comforting, and Toby lets himself crumple. He shakes like a leaf in the wind, his only anchor to the earth being Liberty and her arms around him.

“Let’s go see J.T.,” she says, and he cries even harder. Liberty pulls him through the store, step by step, until the front door opens with a _ding_ and he feels the distinct musk of fresh air on his face. He opens his eyes and draws himself up, so tenuous that he feels like a frayed string, ready to snap and fall to the ground at any moment. Though his view is warped by the curtain of tears in front of it, he could still see just enough to crawl into Liberty’s car.

She starts driving, an he keeps crying.

It’s his first sign that things are going back to normal.

-

The second sign that things are back to normal happens in the hospital, where J.T. is slowly getting well enough to be pushed around in a wheelchair, albeit quite delicately.

The word “Delicate” has never been in J.T.’s nature, so this is more of a challenge than living with a healing stab wound- he keeps wanting to dance, to stretch, to be energetic J.T. again, but Liberty keeps him in check about it, about the fact that he can still be himself when the simple action of bending over causes him impossible pain.

He’s been wheeled out to the hospital cafeteria, and he, Toby, and Liberty all sit around a table, eating dry sandwiches and Jello. It’s the first time they’ve done this in what feels like a lifetime, just eat with each other and occasionally interrupt the companionable quiet with a dumb question or observation, usually from J.T.

“So, I’m guess the first day back didn’t go too well,” he says, still chewing on a bite of his sandwich. Liberty shoots J.T. an angry, chiding look, and for once in his life Toby is actually glad that J.T. got stabbed, otherwise he’d be receiving a harsh smack on the shoulder.

“You’d be right about that,” says Toby through a wry, exhausted laugh.

“What happened?” J.T. asks, and his voice drops down a bit, seriousness creeping into his voice a bit.

“Panic attack. I just sort of, um… It’s like drowning, I guess. Just all the fears and dumb shit and it- it crashed down on me and I had to leave. I just couldn’t stay there,” Toby says. He realizes, in the back of his mind, that he hasn’t been this vulnerable in front of J.T. for a while. He figures it’s because he’s too tired to cover it up, too exhausted to even pretend that this wasn’t his life anymore. 

“That sucks some serious ass. How was the fort being held down? Has the school become a true bummer without me?” J.T. asks. Something about it made Toby smile, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“The school is healing. Everyone got real freaked out about it. Mia is actually the main correspondent right now, so consider yourself lucky that Emma and Manny are back. I’m pretty sure their summaries of what happened have less mean nicknames.”

“Wait, what are her nicknames for me?” J.T. asks.

“No, the mean nicknames aren’t for you. She figured out that calling an assault victim a cheating bastard is bad for her image, so she kind of pushes that on all the other people in the story. Nurse Fatass is one of my favorites, just from hearing the story secondhand,” says Toby, eliciting a soft laugh from Liberty.

“Does she include me in the story at all?” Liberty asks, calm and collected in a way that was so rare to Toby. 

“She calls you Lizzie, apparently. Apparently it’s less embarrassing for her if a good samaritan saves him instead of an ex.”

“How is she embarrassed? I got _stabbed_ , that’s way more embarrassing than anything she can imagine. And I’m handling it with style!” jokes J.T., before shoveling a spoonful of pudding into his mouth. Toby realizes that his light was coming back, the buzzing glow that he only knew existed when it had been snuffed out. 

Despite being embarrassed as shit over being stabbed, J.T. was undeniably and painfully happy.

Toby looks at Liberty by his side, at her mouth moving and saying something that was probably chiding and warm, but she was happy too. She looks less tired, less worn down than he had seen her in a year. 

In this moment, Toby decides that he’d give up anything and everything to make sure that these two stayed happy, even if it meant dancing on his broken heart. 

“Do you want me to tell people what actually happened? Without any changed names?” he asks. Liberty smiles, and his heart does an odd dance in his chest.

“You can certainly try, but I think it’d be so funny if you started spreading lies about it… like, tell them that the guy who stabbed me was, like, my long lost twin and the guy who got arrested was framed… ooh, or you could say that Liberty and Lizzie found me at the same time, and they fought over me and my dying body, on who could hold me as I died… Lizzie fell in love at first sight, for the record-”

“If you spread that around I’ll tell people that you last words before you passed out were ‘Mommy’,” interrupts Liberty, feigning offense and faking it quite badly.

“You love me, you wouldn’t do that,” says J.T., and the words roll off his tongue so easily that it almost shocks Toby.

“Don’t try me, Yorke.”

“What if I did?”

“If you tried me? You’ll wish that the Lakehurst goon killed you before I could ruin your life,” says Liberty, and when J.T. laughs Toby comes to the odd, belated realization that this is apparently okay to joke about now.

Toby just laughs, hoping that he doesn’t sound too shocked or -even worse- too eager to laugh at the subject.

Apparently, he does it right, because the moment moves easily, right into the next one, in the next joke. 

Things are normal again, and he can’t tell if he’s disappointed or if this is just what satisfaction feels like now.


	7. Chapter 7

The rest of his senior year passes in double speed. The next day he goes to school and manages to stomach the whole thing, and after a week of stomaching it, Liberty joins him.

(They don’t talk about it.)

Weeks after that, J.T. comes back to school, with much fanfare. Mia pretends to be shocked that he and Liberty got back together, and she does an effective job of foisting the requirements of _the narrative_ , as she calls it, onto Emma and Manny. She loses her fame as “girlfriend of the stabbed guy” and goes back to “teen mom cheerleader who just happened to date a guy who got stabbed”. It’s a considerable upgrade.

Time passes in weeks and class periods, in naps that last too long to be healthy and watching Liberty and J.T. quietly make plans for the future that’s approaching them so quickly.

Toby realizes that this numbness might be a problem when he gets into college and feels absolutely nothing.

He looks at the letter, and it’s just ink on paper for him. His mom is smiling, his sister is cheering over the phone, but he’s just-

He’s nothing at all. 

J.T. and Liberty get into the same college, and Toby gets invited to the celebration dinner.

He doesn’t go, saying that he has a cold. He decides that he’s not really in the place to play the overjoyed best friend, so he just stays in his room, lights off as he reads over the letter and tries to feel something. He can’t tell if he prefers this over the emotional vividness of the days past, but he gets comfortable enough in it.

“Toby?” his mom asks, breaking him out of his contemplation. She flicks the lights on, and he pretends that he’s waking up. He rolls over and blinks too slowly, hoping that he looks bleary eyed enough for her not to get worried.

“Yuh?” he asks in turn, leaning into the sleepy musk of his voice.

“I’ve been talking to a friend of mine… Miss Spiegelman, if you remember her-”

“Isn’t she the therapist lady?” he asks.

“Yeah, that’s her. She and I, um, both recognize that you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, and I think It might be really helpful if you talked to her about some of your feelings.”

“What if I’m not feeling anything?” he asks, trying to make it sound like a joke. They both know that he’s nowhere near joking.

“That’s something you should talk about, then. Can I schedule a meeting between the two of you?” she asks, and Toby wonders how much of this she’s seen. Does she know about his seemingly never ending state of depression? Had she noticed the irregular eating and the isolation and all of that? Had she been _worried_?

“Yeah, I think that would be a good idea,” he says. 

He doesn’t know how much she’s noticed. He just knows that he’s tired of feeling like this.

-

The first thing he notices about his therapist’s office is that she has an inhumane number of candles, so much so that it’s ridiculous. Her name is Kiara Valdez and Toby has never felt this dumb while talking about his feelings. For the first meeting, he just sticks to the facts of his life.

Born, not popular when young, best friends with J.T., developed an eating disorder, dated Kendra, Kendra moved away, he met Rick Murray, Rick Murray died, J.T. and Liberty got together, Liberty got pregnant, J.T. and Liberty broke up, J.T. almost died, and now he’s here.

“Somewhere in that whole, I fell in love with her. I don’t know when, just that it happened and now I’m absolutely ruined,” he says, focusing not on her face but on the bright purple candle burning right behind her head.

“You should’ve come here earlier,” she says, and his gaze flickers back to her.

“No shit.”

-

Prom is beautiful, absolutely stunning. It’s what senior proms should look like- gauzy and colorful while also carrying an upbeat, happy rhythm to it. Kiara helped him pick out his suit, it’s sleek black against a light pink shirt, and he wishes for a moment that he had someone to appreciate it with. 

He goes stag, because he couldn’t stomach the embarrassment of asking J.T. and Liberty if he could hang off of them.

He spends a fair amount of the night sipping on the spiked punch and chatting with everyone but his best friends. They’re so caught up in their own world that they barely notice how most of his time is spent with the other characters of their youth, people like Emma and Manny who try to teach him (to no success) how to dance, or Mia, who gives him sad smiles and laughs at his strained jokes.

It’s all sort of surreal, in a way. When he looks around the gym, he sees nothing but his childhood. He sees the spot where he fainted, his lab partner from two years ago… there’s a stain on the wall that nobody had ever gotten out, this odd brownish-red spot. Toby doesn’t know how it got their, but it’s just as much a part of his childhood as everything else. The whole room is like one big time capsule, and that overwhelms Toby so much that he has to go to the bathroom to take a break.

He has this very surreal moment, staring into the bathroom mirror of his high school prom. Dance music is playing through the walls, muffled and distorted from distance. He splashed water on his face, and some of it is dripping. His cheeks are blotchy and red, and his eyes look wide and fish-like as he stares into them. 

“Hey dude, you okay?” some voice asks. He turns around and realizes that, of all people, it’s _Peter_. He only knows him through his interactions with their mutual friends, and that makes the moments itself more surreal.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice raw with honesty.

“Are you high?” Peter asks, a small smile playing at his lips.

“Yeah,” says Toby, because that’s so much easier to explain than his decade of mental illness.

“Nice.”

The rest of the night passes in a rush. He goes home early, and falls asleep on the kitchen table, a half eaten bowl of cereal by his hand. His mom takes pictures of the sight in the morning, jokingly calling them “Toby’s Prom Pictures” as she prints them out, ready to put in the photo album.

Toby laughs when he sees them.

-

The day before graduation, Toby finds himself in a very familiar place: taking a walk around the park next to the Van Zandt house with Liberty at his side. It’s a white sun day, and he can’t name what about the scene is so familiar, he just knows that he’s been here before.

There’s a lovely house nearby, white and intricate, they’re practically in its backyard. Liberty showed him this spot years ago, sharing its location like it was a secret, undiscovered corner of her favorite park. In some way or another, it probably was.

It’s a new, dewy day, with the soft ground and the chill still lingering in the air. Liberty’s wearing a fleece jacket, the one with the design so simple that when she outgrew her old one, she just replaced it with a larger one. Something about this moment with her feels so impossibly large.

As if on cue, like she realizes his thoughts, she stops. 

“Hey, Toby?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna be my best man?”

Toby’s world crashes. The white sun above him splits into two and becomes a rattling thunder. The ground swallows him whole, gnawing at him piece by piece until he has disappeared. _This isn’t it_ , he thinks. _This isn’t how it ends._

“What?”

“Me and J.T., it’s- we know we aren’t going to get married right now, or anything, we want to wait a few years, but I… I have this vision, in my mind, and I want this to be something we share, I guess. Me and J.T. have talked about it, and he gave me the ring, and I just- I want you to be my best man. You’re my best friend, Tobes-”

“And you’re my best friend,” says Toby, even though it must be obvious.

“Don’t tell J.T. that,” says Liberty with a smile.

“When are-are you getting married?” Toby asks, stuttering a bit with the words.

“In a couple of years, probably. But it’s going to happen.”

“Why?”

“Because we love each other,” says Liberty, and despite everything, she smiles. That breaks Toby, he can’t say no to that smile. 

“I’ll do it.”

Liberty crashes into him for a ferocious hug, and Toby realizes that it’s all done.

-

“Did you ever write that letter?” Kiara asks, leaning back in her chair. She’s chewing on some gum, and Toby’s clutching a pillow close to his chest as he relays the story.

“What?”

“The letter. From when your sister… after Rick, you wrote letters to your friend, and you tried to write one to Liberty. Ash told you to write one when things weren’t so fresh… did you ever write it?” she asks, and Toby just responds with a numb shale of his head. “You should try.”

-

He writes it at his desk, playing some music in the background as he sits down to put all his thoughts to paper. 

_Dear Liberty_ , he begins. He chews on his pen in deliberation on how to start it, his one big manifesto for the ineffable Liberty Van Zandt, the one who’s voice gave him a lifetime of love in just a few caffeine fueled years.

 _I’ve been in love with you since middle school, but it’s not a big deal,_ he writes. He almost crosses it out before being struck with inspiration, his mind quickly flitting to his next point.

_You’ve ruined me for anyone else, you know. Nobody has our smile or your soft laugh or any of it. No has your brains and your eyes and that soft fleece jacket that’s been in my dreams. I’m not mad at you for it, not you or J.T. or god, if he’s real. I’m just mad at myself for not being what people need me to be._

_I love you and that’s okay. You love J.T. and he loves you and that’s okay. I can’t be mad at myself for all the things I feel anymore, it’s tearing me apart._

_I wanted to thank you for being there for me through everything, and everything that you will be there for. I hope I get better. I hope we all do! I love you._

Toby stares at the page, at its baldness. He picks up the page, balls it up, and tosses it into the trash.

“Fuck this shit,” he mutters under his breath. 

It’s a beginning for him.


End file.
